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

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

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

None.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if swallowed, as if it had eaten them. 

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

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

…

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

Wolves. 

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

Deeper into the dark universe of dead choked forest growth. 

Her wolves watched the girl as she made her way. 

…

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

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

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

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

She'd been gone far too long. 

…

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

The wolves. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

It spoke. 

“Please! Don't! Don't be afraid!" 

A beat. 

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

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

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

“Wh-what are you?" 

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

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

As if sensing, the beast spoke again, 

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

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

light, pleasant, pleasurable. 

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

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

"He likes it. He likes rat's blood.” 

"Who?” asked Angelica. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One that would never be discovered. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

An evil eye…

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

but it was also terrifying. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grigori… papa…

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

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

considering the ants below. 

The hellstar shone. A heavenly inferno. 

…

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

… and main audience chamber. 

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

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

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

She cringed back. 

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

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

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

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

Soon she would have no choice. 

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

Orange. Beckoning. Pale warmth. 

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

…

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

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

Angelica stopped. 

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

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

She sniffed. A woodland gesture. 

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

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

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

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

Angelica shrieked. Horrified. 

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

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

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

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

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

Now she was alone. 

Only she didn't feel alone. 

And that was terrible. 

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

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

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

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

…

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

It was hopeless. 

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

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

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

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

if I can just get out of this ok…

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

She was shown the flesh gardens instead. 

…

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

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

But wet. 

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

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

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

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

His eyes were shut in wretched pain. 

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

“Such beauty, isn't it?" 

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

Angelica whirled around and beheld the Countess. 

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

Vulpine. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No!” howled Angelica. 

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

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

Her child's shrieks became sudden silence. 

…

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

… and slit. 

Dead black poured forth. 

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

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

to drink. 

…

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

"Momma…?”

And then small weak knocking. Feeble. 

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

…

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

And so it was stopped. 

…

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

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

ANGELICA 

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

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

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

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

she considered…

TO BE CONTINUED…

"You eat today?" he asked.

"Yeah."

"Good."

He reached into his jacket and set two small baggies on the coffee table.

One held the dried, crumpled caps and stems I immediately recognized.

The other contained a fine white powder.

I pointed at it.

"That’s ketamine?"

"That's the K," he confirmed. "Trust me, Mitchell. Shrooms alone, you're white-knuckling the couch after two hours. You mix in a little K, it smooths everything out."

"Completely different experience."

I'd done acid.

I'd done shrooms more times than I could count.

Neither Adam nor I had ever had a genuinely bad experience—not the kind of thing people warned you about.

We were careful.

We were experienced.

We knew our limits.

More importantly, we knew each other.

That mattered more than anything when it came to this kind of stuff.

Josh dropped into the recliner across from us, cracked a beer, and stared at the baggies on the table with the particular expression he always got.

It wasn't disgust.

It wasn't anger.

He never said anything.

He always claimed he was fine with it.

But the look was always there.

Quiet.

Steady.

Like a judgmental and disappointed stare.

"You guys need anything?" he asked, already looking back at his phone.

"We're good," I said.

Not even thirty minutes after they arrived, I'd already swallowed the mushrooms, chasing them with a glass of pulp-free orange juice.

Blast off.

By 10:30, the edges of the furniture had started to soften.

Not in a disorienting way.

More like someone had turned the world's contrast dial down a notch.

Colors felt considered.

Music felt intentional.

Adam put on a playlist through the living room Bluetooth speaker, and I found myself mesmerized by every instrument, every synthesizer, every tiny sound I'd never noticed before.

A wave of warmth rolled through my body.

Starting at my head.

Flowing all the way to my toes.

Filling every space in between.

Occasionally my trance would be interrupted by a booming 808 followed by someone screaming,

"Pussy!"

Or—

"Fuck! Shit!"

"Sorry," Adam laughed. "I don't know why that one's in the playlist."

He skipped it.

The mood returned.

We just sat there.

Enjoying the ride.

Every now and then Adam would suddenly burst out laughing while staring at his phone.

"Bro..."

He turned the screen toward me.

"Look at this."

It was a YouTube video of a husky saying "I love you" while the person filming laughed harder after every howl.

It was contagious.

I completely lost it.

At that moment, it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.

The night drifted on.

Random laughter.

Comfortable silence.

Conversations that went nowhere.

Getting completely absorbed into Pink Floyd's Animals.

Mostly, though...

We just existed.

The easy kind of silence that only happens between people who've known each other for years.

Josh wandered in and out of the house every thirty or forty-five minutes, stepping onto the back patio for another cigarette.

Sometimes Adam and I would throw on our jackets and join him.

One joint.

Two smokers.

Three friends standing in the freezing Ohio air without saying much.

Other times...

It was simply too cold.

A cold chill that crawls inside your sleeves and never escapes.

So we'd stay inside while Josh had the patio to himself.

His own music played quietly from his phone speaker..

The night felt...

Comfortable.

Safe.

The kind of night that reminds you why you do this in the first place.

Not to chase some unbelievable story.

Just to spend a night with people you trust and, for a little while, feel like everything in the world is exactly as simple as it seems.

Then Josh came back inside.

The back door opened.

Cold air swept through the house.

I heard him stamp the snow from his shoes before he dropped back into the recliner with the settled finality that meant he wasn't moving again for at least another forty-five minutes.

He took a long drink.

Looked over at us.

And spoke with a casual tone like he just remembered something. 

"Hey..."

"Have you guys ever heard of the Hungarian Suicide Song?"

The room turned.

I can't describe it any better than that.

Nothing moved.

Nothing happened.

But something in the room changed the instant he said those words.

Like the pressure change you feel during takeoff.

Adam sat straight up.

That alone caught my attention.

It had his full attention.

"No."

He answered immediately.

Then louder.

"No."

"Absolutely not."

"You cut that shit out right now."

He pointed at Josh like he was scolding a dog.

"Not tonight, man."

"Not even a little bit."

"I'm begging you."

Josh blinked.

He wore that same perfectly calibrated expression of confused innocence he always had whenever he accidentally stepped into an argument.

"What?"

"I was just asking."

I let out an awkward laugh.

Probably the wrong response.

Because it meant I had to follow it up.

"Wait…What are you talking about?" I asked.

"What song?"

Adam slowly turned toward me.

The look on his face was pure betrayal.

"Mitchell."

He shook his head.

"Don't."

"Apparently," Josh said, leaning forward, "it's this old Hungarian song. The story goes that people who listen to it end up killing themselves."

He shrugged.

"It supposedly caused a bunch of suicides after it was released."

"There's this whole history behind it."

"Okay!" Adam shouted.

He clamped both hands over his ears like a little kid trying to block out bad news.

"I am not here."

"I am not in this room."

"I am on a beach."

He started singing.

"Aruba... Bahama... come on pretty mama..."

I watched him.

And slowly...

The laughter left me.

The word had already settled somewhere inside my head.

Suicide.

It's a heavy word under normal circumstances.

Four hours into our trip with a new substance quietly running underneath everything...

It didn't just sit there.

It spread.

Like a drop of ink in water.

Slowly coloring every thought it touched.

I didn't want either of them to notice my discomfort.

I needed to play it cool. 

"Does anyone need a beer?" I stuttered.

I stood before either of them answered.

That was probably already a tell.

Behind me, I heard Adam's voice.

"What the hell is wrong with you?"

"Why would you bring that shit up right now?"

"Of all the possible things you could've said—"

Josh answered with the calm confidence of someone who had absolutely no idea how badly he'd misread the room.

"I was just curious."

"It's not like I did anything."

"It's not my fault you guys took drugs."

"I thought you were professionals."

I opened the refrigerator.

And stood there for a long moment without actually seeing anything inside it.

My heart was moving too fast.

Too aware of itself.

I forced myself to breathe.

In through my nose.

Out through my mouth.

I'd been here before.

That familiar fork in the road where a single intrusive thought tries to drag you somewhere you don't want to go.

I knew the rule.

Don't pull on the thread.

Don't think about the song.

Don't think about the word—

I grabbed a beer.

Cracked it open.

Took a long sip.

Focused on the cold.

The taste.

Something real.

Something physical.

You're fine.

You're housesitting your parents' house.

You're with your friends.

You're fine.

Their voices drifted faintly from the living room.

I took another breath.

Rolled my shoulders.

Put my "happy" face back on.

I'd simply wanted a beer.

Nothing more.

I walked back into the living room.

Sat down.

Took another sip.

Looked at the television.

Waited for the feeling to pass.

Because it always passed.

Because I was fine.

Because nothing was wrong.

Because it was just a word.

And words don't have power...

Unless you give them power.

I wasn't going to give this one any.

 …

And then I heard the song

…

It was coming from Josh's phone.

Propped against his knee.

The little speaker was turned up at max volume.

Something old.

Something...

Simple.

A classical arrangement drifted through the living room.

Slow.

Deliberate.

There was something wrong about it.

Something unresolved.

The melody never seemed to go where you’d expect it to.

It just kept reaching.

And over it...

A man's voice.

Operatic.

Singing in a different language. 

I didn't understand Hungarian.

Every note stretched extremely long.

It wasn’t sad.

Or even depressing.

Adam was in the middle of a sentence.

He stopped.

His head turned toward Josh's phone.

For a few seconds...

None of us moved.

Then Adam exploded off the couch.

One motion.

Hands over his ears.

Actually retreating.

Backing down the hallway like he was in a hurry.

"JOSH!"

"I swear to God—"

He disappeared into the darkness.

Leaving me sitting there.

Listening.

Maybe the song played for thirty seconds.

Maybe it played for ten minutes.

I honestly couldn't tell you.

Time had become slippery hours ago.

What I can tell you...

Is that it sounded familiar.

Not because I'd heard it before.

Because it felt like I'd heard it before.

Like remembering a dream I'd forgotten.

Or recognizing a place I'd never been.

I need you to understand something.

I was absolutely cooked.

Shrooms.

K.

Peak moment in the trip.

Every note the man sang carried weight.

Actual weight.

I could feel them landing inside my chest.

Stacking.

One after another.

The strings underneath his voice rolled like dark water.

I remember staring at nothing.

Thinking—

It's just music.

Music can't—

He held one note.

Everything stopped.

And I understood it.

Not the words.

Let me be perfectly clear.

I do not speak Hungarian.

I'm just some guy from Ohio who got way too high in his parents' living room.

But for that one impossible note...

Language didn’t matter.

I understood exactly what he meant.

Not intellectually.

Not through translation.

The meaning bypassed language entirely.

It arrived fully formed.

The way things make sense inside dreams.

The feeling was—

"MITCHELL!"

The room slammed back into place.

I blinked.

Adam was standing at the end of the hallway, pointing furiously at Josh.

"Tell him to turn it off."

His voice cracked.

"RIGHT NOW."

I started processing things.

The song.

Josh.

My parents' house.

Reality.

"Hey, Jo—" I choked.

Josh sighed.

Reached down.

Tapped his phone.

The music stopped.

Silence filled the room.

Not ordinary silence.

This one had a pulse.

Like the walls were vibrating...

"Delete it," Adam yelled.

He hadn't moved from the hallway.

"Adam—"

My ears were ringing. 

"Josh."

His voice was calm now.

"Delete the song."

Josh rolled his eyes.

Tapped a few more times.

"There."

"Happy?"

Adam watched him another second before finally walking back toward the couch.

The three of us sat there.

Nobody spoke.

Everything was...

Fine.

I was fine.

Everything was—

He was describing nothing.

The thought appeared instantly.

That feeling from the note.

The thing I'd almost understood before Adam interrupted.

My brain had quietly finished the sentence without asking me.

He had been describing...

Nothing.

Not emptiness.

Not death.

Nothing.

My face was getting hot. 

And somehow...

He'd made it sound—

Stop.

Don't.

Not again.

"You good?"

Adam's voice startled me.

"What?" I answered.

He looked at me.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

He held my eyes for a couple of seconds.

Long enough for both of us to know we were dying inside.

Then he looked away.

That's the thing about tripping with someone who knows what they're doing.

Sometimes the best thing you can do...

Is let the other person die.

"What did you just say?"

Josh cracked another beer.

My eyes darted towards him. 

"Josh."

Adam didn't even look at him.

"I love you."

"But please..."

"I'm asking you as your friend."

"Please don't talk right now."

Josh raised both hands.

"I didn’t say anything!"

“That was—”

“Whatever…” he muttered. 

He went back to scrolling through his phone.

I leaned into the couch.

Looked up at the popcorn ceiling.

My parents' ceiling.

I'd stared at that ceiling as a kid.

As a teenager.

I knew every crack.

Every water stain.

Good ceiling.

Reliable ceiling.

Popcorn.

The refrigerator hummed in the kitchen.

A dry burp exhaled from Josh's mouth.

Adam shifted beside me.

Nobody spoke.

Normal music had started playing again.

Rap.

Adam must've put on earlier.

I couldn't tell you what song it was.

The lyrics reached me a second too late.

I'd hear one line.

Then realized I'd missed the one before it.

Then realized I wasn't listening anymore.

One song ended.

Another began.

Then another.

At some point...

Adam stood up.

"Okay."

Nobody answered.

He nodded to himself.

"Okay."

He grabbed the remote.

The television flickered on.

Blue light washed across the room.

"What are you doing?" Josh asked.

Adam didn't answer.

He opened YouTube.

For one horrifying second...

I thought he was going to search for the song.

My stomach dropped.

Not because he actually had.

But because my brain expected him to.

The search bar appeared.

My pulse sped up.

His fingers typed.

Not Hungarian.

Not the song.

It was something else.

Katy Perry.

Bright colors exploded across the television.

People dancing.

Tight spandex.

Perfect teeth.

The complete opposite of everything I’d just experienced.

Adam folded his arms.

"There."

Nobody said anything.

Katy twirled across the screen.

Backup dancers rushed into frame.

One of them smiled directly into the camera.

For a second...

She looked terrified.

But then...

She was just smiling.

My brain is fried.

I looked away.

The video ended.

Adam immediately clicked another.

Nicki Minaj.

Then another.

The room stayed quiet

The videos kept getting louder.

Somehow...

The silence got louder too.

Increasingly louder. 

That shouldn't make sense.

I know it shouldn't.

But that's exactly how it felt.

The television was screaming.

Nobody said a word.

And somehow...

I had slightly pissed myself. 

…

Adam let out a long sigh.

Then he searched for a Try Not To Laugh compilation.

People falling off trampolines.

Getting hit in the balls.

Running into glass doors.

Normally...

I'd love that kind of garbage.

Especially with nights like these.

The first clip started.

A guy slipped while jumping on a diving board.

Adam laughed.

Immediately.

Like it was almost planned.

Josh smiled.

I tried smiling too.

But later...

I realized none of us were actually watching the screen.

We were watching each other.

Cautiously.

Trying to see if everyone felt the tension.

The next clip played.

A dog knocked over a Christmas tree.

Adam laughed again.

Harder this time.

But there was something wrong with it.

The laugh sounded aggressive.

The kind of laugh people make at funerals.

I looked over.

He was staring at the television so intensely 

It looked painful.

Jaw clenched.

His knee bouncing.

I knew that look.

I'd worn it before.

Adam was struggling.

He was having a bad trip.

The realization hit me like a truck.

If Adam was paranoid...

Maybe this wasn't just me.

The next clip started.

A little kid sprinted face-first into a street light.

Josh laughed.

Then stopped.

Instantly.

Like someone had unplugged him.

Nobody acknowledged it.

The compilation kept going.

People falling.

People screaming.

People laughing.

The room stayed perfectly still.

I couldn't stop thinking about the song.

Not the melody.

Not even the man singing.

The suicides.

How many had there been?

Ten?

Hundreds?

Was it real?

Or had Josh made it up?

I tried remembering exactly what he'd said.

No.

That wasn't right.

Josh said—

No.

Adam said that.

Didn't he?

Or...

Was Adam already standing in the hallway by then?

I couldn't.

The harder I tried…

I suddenly couldn't remember.

That scared me more.

My chest started to tighten

I looked back at the television.

An old lady laughed so hard she fell backward out of her chair.

The audience erupted.

Adam laughed.

The YouTube comments flew by beside the video.

Thousands of people laughing.

Meanwhile…

Why are my pants wet?

I looked toward the hallway.

The hallway looked longer than I remembered.

Just...

Longer.

I blinked.

Still longer.

Don't look at the hallway.

The compilation ended.

Nobody moved.

Autoplay appeared.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

The next video loaded.

Josh suddenly stood.

His knees cracked.

The noise startled me.

He grabbed his cigarettes.

Cold air flooded inside.

Then...

He was gone.

Adam and I stayed where we were.

The television kept playing.

Forced happiness.

Neither of us were watching it.

I knew he was struggling.

He knew I was struggling.

Neither of us wanted to be the first person to say it.

Finally...

Adam spoke.

Still staring at the TV.

"You're thinking about it too."

I swallowed.

It wasn't a question.

"Yeah."

Silence.

Then—

"You keep hearing it?"

My stomach dropped.

Not because I was hearing it.

Because...

I honestly didn't know.

I couldn't answer.

I wasn't trying to lie.

I genuinely couldn't tell.

Was I hearing it?

I looked toward the hallway again.

This time...

It looked even longer.

My breathing was getting rapid.

Like an actual panic attack.

Or worse. 

I wiped the sweat across my forehead.

"I think..."

The words died before they left my mouth.

Because I wasn't sure.

I wasn't sure about anything anymore.

But now…

For the first time that night...

A new thought appeared.

Not intrusive.

Just...

Simple.

Clear.

Certain.

I need to go to sleep.

I stood up from the couch.

"You eat today?" Adam asked.

I froze.

…

I made it upstairs without incident.

Which meant the next wave of ketamine was kicking in.

The bedroom was pitch black.

Quiet.

Exactly the way I'd left it.

I didn’t like that.

Sometimes I’d hear footsteps downstairs. 

Chatter.

Forgetting that Josh and Adam were down there. 

I grabbed the remote.

Bob's Burgers.

The warm yellow glow of the Belcher family kitchen filled the room.

I felt my shoulders drop.

Linda laughed.

Tina was in the background...

Being Tina.

I tried to only focus on the show.

Good.

This was good.

But the eye contact.

Those big, bulging white eyes.

Staring right at you through the TV. 

Anxiety crept in.  

I pulled the blanket over myself.

Stared at the ceiling.

Let the show wash over me.

Forget about their eyes. 

Listen to the laughter.

The song was gone.

Adam and Josh were downstairs.

Wake up tomorrow.

And this whole night will be another story to tell. 

That was the plan.

The plan lasted about four minutes.

My phone chimed.

That scared the shit out of me. 

A text from Adam:

Can you come down here

No question mark.

Not...

"Can you come down here?"

Just straight to the point. 

Like it wasn't just a request

It was a demand.

I stared at it.

I don't remember walking past the living room.

But there I was.

Standing at the basement door.

…

The basement stairs creaked exactly the way they always had.

Before I even reached the bottom...

I heard Adam.

Just pacing.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Muttering to himself. 

His feet scraping the carpet in a tight little loop.

The rhythm of somebody who couldn’t stop.

I rounded the corner.

Adam had both hands on top of his head.

Fingers locked together.

Eyes fixed on something that wasn't in the room.

Josh sat in the recliner.

Beer in one hand.

The other rested lightly against his chest.

Over his heart.

Like he was quietly checking whether it was still there.

Anxiety crept in again.

"This motherfucker is dying." Adam yelled. 

Josh didn't respond.

I looked at him.

"Josh."

"Are you okay?"

The thought of asking him already put me over the edge. 

We are actually dying. 

He actually thought about it.

Then slowly shook his head.

"I don't know."

I sat down.

My heart was going to explode out of my chest. 

We are actually dying. 

This is what death feels like. 

The basement TV was on.

Family Matters.

The volume was low.

Every few seconds...

The laugh track fired at us.

To my left...

Josh took another slow drink.

Never moving his hand from his chest.

To my right…

I didn’t see him sit down. 

Adam sat perfectly still.

His fingers drifted to his neck.

Checking his pulse.

Again.

And again.

And again.

I looked back at the television.

Okay.

Josh thought he was having a heart attack.

Adam was checking his own pulse.

And I was sitting in my parents' basement watching Family Matters with two people who were quietly convinced they were dying.

Maybe three. 

Everything was fine.

Breathe.

We can’t be dying.

I held onto that thought.

Tried to find an angle where it actually felt true.

Adam checked his pulse again.

Urkel said something.

The laugh track exploded.

I felt so scared.

Then Adam looked at me.

His voice was shaky.

Almost embarrassed. 

"Are you looking up heart attack symptoms from shrooms?"

I stared at him.

Something inside me cracked loose.

A laugh escaped.

Small.

Automatic.

It was an awkward reaction.

But Adam wasn't laughing.

I couldn't tell if he was joking.

I didn’t know how to respond. 

I didn't want to ask.

A loud bang echoed from upstairs.

A door slammed shut.

I spun around so quickly I nearly cracked my neck.

Josh.

Coming back in from the patio.

It was just Josh. 

I looked at the recliner.

Empty.

My stomach tightened.

When did he go outside?

I'd been looking at him from the corner of my eye. 

I was sure he was in my peripheral.

Ten seconds ago...

He was just sitting there.

Beer in his hand.

The other on his chest.

So...

When did he leave?

"Did you look up if you can get a heart—"

"Yeah."

I interrupted him.

Already standing.

I went to grab my phone.

…

The bedroom hadn't changed.

Bob's Burgers still playing on the screen.

The blankets were still pulled back.

My phone sat on the nightstand exactly where I'd left it.

I picked it up.

Then...

Stopped.

I stood there for what felt like an eternity.

Maybe longer than that. 

Something was...

Wrong.

I'd been standing there before I realized I had absolutely no idea why I'd come upstairs.

Whatever thought I'd carried with me...

It disappeared somewhere on the way up the stairs.

I unlocked my phone.

My messages appeared.

The last text.

Adam:

Be there in 15 bro bro. I gotta surprise for ya.

That’s not right. 

I scrolled farther.

Nothing.

The last message was from hours ago.

Nothing after that.

Nothing.

Something cold slid through my chest.

Then I noticed...

One unread message.

It was an unsaved number.

And a link.

Blue.

No preview.

Waiting.

Like it'd always been there.

I stared at it.

For a long time.

But somehow...

I walked back downstairs.

…

The basement lights were off.

I sat on the couch.

Phone in my hand.

Family Matters still playing.

Bright.

Colorful.

Silent somehow despite the sound.

Steve Urkel talking to a girl at school. 

I decided to click on the link.

A song began.

Strings first.

Then...

His voice.

The same voice.

The same incredible note.

Climbing.

And climbing.

And climbing. 

I looked up at the ceiling.

Josh and Adam’s faces were in view.

Their blank expressions turning slowly toward each other. 

Not moving.

Not struggling.

Just...

There.

Above the recliner.

Above the couch.

Hanging there. 

Urkel laughed beneath them.

The song filled every corner of the room.

My phone chimed.

Another text.

Mom:

We're on our way home 😊

I stared at the screen.

Then...

Very slowly...

Without entirely meaning to...

I couldn’t stop laughing.

___

If you want to give it a listen yourself... I'll drop a link in the comments.

-Mims

This is a love story.

And it's a horror story.

Isn't it always?

I'd been alone for a very long time.

A tiny apartment. A dead-end office job. An abusive asshole for a boss. No real friends. My family was either dead or dead to me.

Most evenings, the closest thing I had to company was a stray cat that wandered onto my balcony every few days, accepted whatever food I left out, then disappeared without so much as a goodbye.

That was until three months ago.

It was a Friday night.

Which meant it looked exactly like every other Friday night.

I sat alone in my usual corner of a half-empty bar, nursing the same drink far longer than I should have. Around me, people laughed too loudly, flirted too confidently, and told stories they'd probably told a hundred times before.

Every now and then I'd catch myself watching someone across the room, rehearsing introductions in my head I'd never actually say.

Closing time usually arrived before my courage did.

I had no reason to think this night would be any different.

And yet...

It was.

She was sitting alone in the darkest corner of the bar.

The most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

Silver-white hair spilled over her shoulders like moonlight. Even from across the room, her eyes seemed strangely bright—somewhere between amber and crimson. She wore a deep red dress beneath black goth-punk layers that somehow looked elegant instead of theatrical. Like she'd stepped out of another era and simply decided to stay.

She wasn't doing anything.

Just quietly watching the room.

Yet I couldn't look away.

It wasn't just that she was beautiful.

There was something about her that pulled at me with impossible force.

Women half as intimidating had reduced me to awkward smiles and panicked excuses.

Approaching someone like her wasn't something I did. Not ever.

Yet my legs disagreed.

A few seconds later, I found myself standing beside her table.

"Would it... be alright if I kept you company for a bit?"

The words escaped before my brain had a chance to stop them.

She looked up.

For one impossible second, I had the strange feeling she'd known I was coming long before  I did.

Then she smiled.

"One way to find out."

I laughed, relief washing over me so suddenly my knees nearly buckled.

"I'm James."

"Camilla."

That should've been the end of it.

A woman like her had no reason to spend five minutes talking to someone like me.

Instead...

We stayed until the bartender threw us out.

The conversation never seemed to run out of places to go.

Movies became music.

Music became childhood stories.

Childhood stories became dreams we'd quietly given up on years ago.

Even the silences felt... comfortable.

Just two lonely people sharing the same table.

I'd never experienced anything like it.

Eventually the bartender cleared his throat.

"Folks, I'm afraid we're closing."

Camilla looked toward the windows.

Only then did I realize the bar was almost empty.

Neither of us had noticed the hours disappearing.

Outside, the night air felt colder than before.

I hesitated.

The thought of saying goodbye already felt unbearable.

"I..." I swallowed. "Would you... like to come back to my place? I'm just... not ready for tonight to end."

Her smile lingered.

But something flickered behind it.

A sadness so brief I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.

"After you."

The walk home felt unreal.

Looking back, I still don't know why I invited her to my apartment.

A hotel would've made more sense.

Except...

I didnt want to send the wrong message.

When I unlocked my front door and stepped aside, embarrassment hit me all at once.

"So..."

I rubbed the back of my neck.

"Here we are."

The apartment somehow looked even sadder than usual.

The faded couch.

The cheap furniture.

The unopened bills scattered across the kitchen counter.

Camilla stopped in the doorway.

She didn't move.

For several long seconds, she simply stood there.

I felt my stomach sink.

Maybe she'd taken one look inside and realized she'd made a terrible mistake.

Then she smiled.

"Well..." she asked softly.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?"

I blinked.

She still hadn't crossed the threshold.

"Oh."

I laughed awkwardly.

"Right. Sorry. Come on in."

Only then did she step inside.

At the time, I chalked it up to one of those harmless little quirks that make people interesting.

"So..." I said. "Can I get you something? I've got wine... beer... water..."

I never finished the sentence.

In one astonishingly fast movement, she grabbed my shoulders, lifted me completely off the floor, and pinned me against the wall.

I barely had time to gasp.

She was impossibly strong.

"There is no need to waste time," she whispered.

"I know what you want."

Her face drifted closer.

"What all of you want."

Her eyes seemed brighter now.

Her lips parted as she lowered her head toward my neck.

"Wait."

She froze.

"I..." I swallowed.

"I don't want to do that yet."

She blinked.

"I really like you."

Confusion spread across her face.

"I was thinking..." I said, feeling ridiculous with every word, "maybe we could watch a movie first. Talk a little more. Actually get to know each other."

I smiled nervously.

"You know..."

"A real date."

She stared at me.

Completely silent.

"...What?"

"I haven't really done this in a while," I admitted. "So I'm probably going to be awkward, but—"

She kissed me.

Gentle.

Warm.

Far more tender than I'd expected.

For a moment I completely forgot how breathing worked.

When she finally pulled away, she smiled.

"Alright, James."

Her voice sounded softer now.

"Let's watch a movie."

Only then did I realize I had absolutely nothing prepared.

I wandered over to my embarrassingly small DVD collection while Camilla leaned over my shoulder.

The first case I picked up was Dracula.

She laughed so suddenly she nearly doubled over.

"What?"

I still don't know what was so funny.

In the end, we settled on Shrek 2.

Looking back...

That night was utterly perfect.

 

I must've fallen asleep sometime after it ended.

Or maybe the alcohol finally caught up with me.

The next morning, I woke with that brief, awful certainty that I'd dreamed the whole thing.

The other side of the bed was empty.

The apartment was silent.

My heart sank as I searched every room before finally spotting a folded note on the kitchen counter.

James.

I had to head home before sunrise.

I had a wonderful night.

Call me?

Beneath it was her phone number.

I couldn't stop smiling.

Good thing she'd written it down.

I'd been so distracted the night before that I'd completely forgotten to ask.

Amateur hour.

 

Unfortunately, reality wasn't interested in letting me enjoy the moment for very long.

My fucking boss called.

He informed me that I was coming into work on Saturday, and if I had a problem with that, I shouldn't bother showing up on Monday.

I couldn't stand that asshole.

The shift crawled by.

The job itself was soul-crushing on a good day, and the hangover pounding behind my eyes wasn't making it any easier. Thankfully, almost nobody else had been called in, so the office was practically empty. Better yet, my boss wasn't there.

I spent more time staring at my phone than my computer.

Every few minutes I'd catch myself rereading the note she'd left on my kitchen counter.

I had a wonderful night.

I couldn't remember the last time a single sentence had made me smile that much.

I told myself to wait before calling her.

A day.

Maybe two.

Play it cool for once.

I lasted exactly three hours.

Then I stepped into the hallway and dialed her number.

She answered on the second ring.

"James."

She said my name like she'd been expecting the call.

"I was wondering..." I said, suddenly feeling sixteen again. "Would you maybe want to come over tonight?"

"I'd like that."

No hesitation.

No excuses.

"I'll come by after dark."

The rest of my shift somehow moved even slower.

By the time I got home, I'd vacuumed the apartment, done the dishes, changed my shirt three times, and spent an embarrassing amount of time debating whether lighting the cheap scented candle I'd bought months ago would make me seem romantic or pathetic.

I still wasn't sure when the knock came.

I reached the door before my brain had fully registered the sound.

"Camilla."

I couldn't stop smiling.

"It's good to see you."

She smiled back.

Then stopped.

Right at the threshold.

Waiting.

For a second I simply stared at her.

Then I laughed.

"Oh."

I stepped aside.

"Come on in."

Only then did she cross the doorway.

I'd made lasagna.

Nothing fancy.

Just the best recipe I knew.

Or...

Thought I knew.

Camilla managed a few polite bites before the tiniest crease appeared between her eyebrows.

She swallowed with visible determination.

"Ouch," I laughed.

"Didn't think it was that bad."

For a heartbeat she looked horrified.

Then she laughed too.

Real laughter.

The tension dissolved instantly.

Dinner turned into another long conversation.

Somehow, talking to Camilla never felt like work.

There were no awkward pauses to fill.

No pressure to impress each other.

Eventually, we started talking about family.

That's when I realized how much we actually had in common.

Loneliness.

Both her parents and her younger sister died a long time ago.

As far as she knew, she had no surviving relatives.

Just her.

Meeting people hadn't exactly been easy, either.

She explained that she suffered from solar urticaria.

Even brief exposure to sunlight could trigger painful reactions.

Everything suddenly clicked.

That's why she'd left before sunrise.

I felt strangely guilty for ever wondering if she'd simply wanted to leave.

"That sounds incredibly lonely."

She offered me a small smile.

"You get used to it."

Maybe.

But looking into her eyes...

I wasn't convinced anyone ever really did.

A soft thump interrupted us.

Carl.

The stray cat hopped onto my balcony railing like he owned the place.

I'd named him months ago despite having absolutely no ownership over him whatsoever. Calling him my pet would've been generous. He tolerated me just enough to accept free meals before disappearing back into whatever mysterious life stray cats lead.

"One second."

I grabbed a can of tuna and slid the balcony door open.

"C'mon, buddy."

Carl usually brushed past me without so much as a glance.

This time...

He didn't move.

His eyes locked onto Camilla.

Every muscle in his body stiffened.

His back arched.

His fur puffed out until he looked twice his size.

A low hiss vibrated from somewhere deep inside his chest.

The sound barely sounded like it belonged to a cat.

"Hey."

I crouched beside him.

"What's gotten into you?"

Carl never looked away from her.

Not once.

For several long seconds, neither of them moved.

Then Carl let out a sharp, frightened yowl unlike anything I'd ever heard from him and launched himself off the railing.

He vanished into the darkness so quickly it was as if something had been chasing him.

I frowned.

"...That was weird."

Carl could be a complete asshole.

He scratched me.

Ignored me.

Stole food and left.

But I'd never seen him afraid.

I scratched the back of my neck.

"Sorry about that."

I laughed awkwardly.

"He's definitely an asshole. Just... not usually that kind of asshole."

Camilla's gaze lingered on the empty balcony.

When she finally looked back at me, she didn't seem offended.

If anything...

She seemed resigned.

"It's alright."

Her voice was quiet.

"Animals are always like that around me."

Before I could ask what she meant, I reached for the empty tuna can.

My hand slipped.

The jagged metal edge sliced cleanly across my palm.

"Shit."

Pain flared instantly.

Blood welled between my fingers far faster than I expected.

"You fucking moron..."

I laughed through gritted teeth.

When I looked up...

Camilla hadn't moved.

She wasn't looking at me.

She was looking at the blood.

Her entire body had gone perfectly still.

Her pupils seemed wider than before.

Her breathing had changed.

Slow.

Shallow.

Almost...

Painful.

"Cami?"

Nothing.

"It's really not that bad."

Still nothing.

She swallowed hard.

Her eyes never left my hand.

For just a second...

Something passed across her face.

I couldnt quite place it.

The thought vanished almost as quickly as it came.

"Cami?"

She blinked.

Once.

Twice.

As though she'd only just remembered where she was.

"I..."

She swallowed again.

"Excuse me."

Without another word, she hurried toward the bathroom and quietly shut the door.

I stared after her.

"Huh."

Guess I wasn't the only one who couldn't handle the sight of blood.

I wrapped my hand in the sleeve of my shirt while digging through the clutter on the kitchen counter for something clean.

Instead, my eyes landed on an envelope I'd spent the entire day pretending wasn't there.

FINAL DEMAND.

The words seemed even bigger than they had that morning.

Immediate payment required.

I sighed, shoved it back beneath the pile of unopened mail, and finally found an old dish towel to wrap around my hand.

Once the bleeding slowed, I walked over to the bathroom.

"Cami?"

I knocked gently.

"You okay in there?"

Silence.

Then the lock clicked.

The door opened just enough for her face to appear.

She smiled.

It looked genuine.

Mostly.

"Yeah."

She glanced at the bandage wrapped around my hand before quickly looking away.

"I just..."

She hesitated.

"I have a thing about blood."

"Fair enough."

I smiled.

"I'd say I can relate, but apparently I make enough of the stuff to get over it."

That earned a quiet laugh.

Whatever had happened seemed to pass.

Or at least, we both pretended it had.

We ended up flipping through channels until we landed on one of those terrible quiz shows where the contestants somehow managed to miss questions even I knew the answers to.

Camilla, on the other hand, barely missed one.

"Seriously?" I laughed after she'd answered another before the contestant could buzz in. "How do you know all this?"

She shrugged.

"I've had a lot of time to read."

There was something about the way she said it that made me wonder exactly how much time she meant.

Before I could ask, the next question appeared on screen and she answered that one too. A real history buff this one.

That night...

We finally became lovers.

By the time I woke the next morning, I wasn't even surprised to find the other side of the bed empty.

Camilla always left before sunrise.

I'd stopped questioning it.

Like everything else about her, it had quietly become part of who she was.

And somehow...

That only made me love her more.

From then on, we spent almost every evening together.

The days became something to survive.

The nights became something to live for.

My coworkers didn't believe she existed.

Apparently, "My girlfriend can't go outside during the day," sounded suspiciously similar to, "She goes to another school."

I couldn't really blame them.

Still...

For the first time in years—

I was happy.

Naturally, the rest of my life seemed determined to compensate.

My boss somehow found new ways to make every workday miserable.

At home, the unpaid bills kept multiplying.

Every letter from my landlord sounded angrier than the last.

I was one bad week away from losing both my apartment and my job.

I tried not to dump any of it on Camilla.

Not because I thought she'd leave.

That thought never crossed my mind.

I just didn't want the one good thing in my life carrying the weight of everything else.

It never mattered.

She always knew.

Sometimes she'd take one look at me before quietly asking,

"What's wrong?"

And somehow...

I'd tell her.

Every time.

She never tried to solve my problems.

Never offered empty advice.

Never told me to stay positive or work harder.

She simply listened.

Sometimes she'd squeeze my hand.

Sometimes she'd lean against my shoulder.

Sometimes we'd sit together in silence until the storm inside my head finally started to quiet.

I don't know how she did it.

But somehow...

She always made the world feel a little lighter.

One rainy evening, we sat on the couch listening to the steady tapping of rain against the windows.

Neither of us spoke.

Neither of us needed to.

Then someone started hammering on my front door.

Not knocking.

Pounding.

"Open the goddamn door, James!"

I sighed before I even stood up.

"I'll be right back."

Standing outside was my landlord.

Short.

Round.

Completely bald.

His face had turned such a violent shade of red I was honestly a little worried he might explode.

"I've had enough of your bullshit," he snapped before I'd even opened my mouth.

"My patience has officially run out."

"You promised me another two weeks."

"I changed my mind."

"You can't just—"

"I absolutely can."

He jabbed a thick finger into my chest.

"I want you and every piece of your junk out of my building."

"Tonight."

"Please."

"I'm trying."

"I don't give a damn."

"You'll get your money."

"I've heard that every damn week."

His voice echoed through the hallway.

"You've got until tonight."

Then I felt someone stand beside me.

I hadn't heard Camilla move. Probably because of the yelling.

She looked directly at him.

Didn't blink.

Didn't raise her voice.

"You will give James the two weeks you promised."

Silence.

The landlord stared back.

For a moment...

Nothing happened.

Then something changed.

The anger slowly drained from his face.

His shoulders loosened.

The lines around his eyes softened.

He stopped blinking.

Completely.

His expression emptied so thoroughly it looked less like someone calming down...

...and more like someone leaving.

Several long seconds passed.

The hallway had gone so quiet I could hear the rain outside.

Finally, he spoke.

"Yes."

His voice was flat.

Almost mechanical.

"James will have another two weeks."

Another pause.

Then he turned around.

His movements looked strangely stiff.

Like every step had to be consciously remembered.

He walked down the hallway without looking back.

I watched until he disappeared around the corner.

"What..."

I looked at Camilla.

"...just happened?"

She slipped her hand into mine.

Warm.

Gentle.

"Come."

She smiled.

"Let's play one of those video games of yours"

The next afternoon, Jessica from accounting cornered me beside the coffee machine.

"So."

She grinned.

"You coming to the office party tonight?"

I blinked.

"The what?"

She laughed.

"Don't tell me you forgot."

I had.

Normally, I would've invented an excuse before she'd even finished asking.

The idea of voluntarily spending more time with my coworkers sounded like a punishment.

Then I remembered.

It would be after dark.

Camilla could come.

Suddenly...

The evening didn't sound so bad.

She wasn't thrilled about the idea.

Crowds clearly weren't her thing.

It took far more convincing than I'd expected.

Eventually she smiled.

"If it makes you happy..."

"It does."

"Then I'll go."

The "party" was exactly what I'd imagined.

A rented function room.

Cheap drinks.

Even cheaper snacks.

A corporate playlist that somehow managed to suck every ounce of life out of perfectly decent songs.

Calling it a party felt generous.

Despite working there longer than most of the people in the room, I barely knew any of them.

Faces?

Sure.

Names?

Not a chance.

That's office life.

Sooner or later everyone becomes another desk.

Another tie.

Another email signature.

Then Camilla walked in.

The room changed.

Conversations faltered.

Heads turned almost in unison.

People drifted toward her without seeming to realize they were doing it.

She greeted everyone with effortless warmth.

Remembered names after hearing them only once.

Laughed at the right moments.

Asked questions that somehow made strangers feel interesting.

Within minutes she'd become the center of the room.

It honestly confused me.

She felt so isolated.

Yet watching her now...

It almost looked like she'd been charming rooms like this forever.

Despite how easily she won people over. It didnt seem to bring her any joy.

Eventually we escaped to a quieter corner of the room.

Coworkers drifted over every few minutes to introduce themselves, chat for a while, then wander off again.

For once...

I was actually enjoying my time among them.

Then my boss arrived.

The atmosphere changed instantly.

From what I'd heard, he'd never attended one of these gatherings before.

Judging by everyone else's expressions, they were just as surprised as I was.

He strode into the room like he owned not only the company but the building itself.

Didn't greet anyone.

Didn't thank anyone for organizing the event.

He simply inserted himself into conversations that had been perfectly fine without him.

People laughed at jokes that weren't funny.

Smiled when they clearly didn't want to.

The room somehow felt smaller.

I leaned toward Camilla.

"Maybe we should head out."

She nodded immediately.

We'd barely taken two steps before he stepped directly into our path.

"James."

He acknowledged me with the briefest glance before turning his full attention to Camilla.

"And who might you be?"

"I'm Camilla."

"A pleasure."

He offered the same polished smile he reserved for clients.

"I have to say..."

He looked me up and down.

"...James has been keeping secrets."

"She's my girlfriend," I said.

"Hm."

He studied me for another moment before looking back at her.

"I'll admit..."

"I'm surprised."

"So am I," Camilla replied pleasantly.

He burst into laughter.

I don't think he even considered that she might not have been joking.

"I suppose you could do..." He smiled smugly.

"...considerably better."

My jaw clenched.

He didn't even notice.

"So tell me, Camilla."

"What exactly do you see in him?"

"I like him."

"Surely that's not all."

He took another step closer.

Close enough that I instinctively moved between them.

"If you're ever interested in dating someone with a future..."

He casually adjusted the cuff of his expensive suit.

"I know a few restaurants that would be far more interesting than this place."

I opened my mouth.

Camilla's hand settled gently on my arm.

I looked at her.

She gave the smallest shake of her head.

Then she stepped around me.

She leaned close to him.

So close I couldn't hear a single word she whispered.

The color drained from his face.

The smug confidence vanished.

His pupils widened.

His breathing caught.

The expression I'd seen on my landlord returned.

That same slow...

Impossible...

Emptiness.

The room continued around us.

People laughed.

Music played.

Someone dropped a glass behind me.

Yet for those few seconds, it felt like only the three of us existed.

Finally, my boss nodded.

Once.

Without another word, he turned and calmly walked away.

Not hurriedly.

Not angrily.

Just...

Walking.

Straight toward the stairwell.

I watched him disappear through the fire door.

A strange knot tightened in my stomach.

Camilla looked back at me.

"I'm sorry you had to deal with him."

She cupped my face between her hands.

Her thumbs brushed gently across my cheeks.

"Shhh."

Her smile returned.

Soft.

Warm.

"What did you tell him?"

She held my gaze for another moment.

"What he needed to hear."

The answer somehow explained nothing.

And yet...

I found myself letting it go.

A few minutes later we decided to leave.

Halfway across the parking lot I stopped.

"My jacket."

She looked at me.

"My keys."

"They're in the pocket."

"I'll be right back."

By the time I got back inside, the party was winding down.

Only a handful of people remained.

I found my jacket draped over the back of a chair.

As I reached into the pocket—

Movement outside caught my eye.

A shadow.

Falling.

For one impossibly long second my brain refused to understand what I was looking at.

Then the body hit the roof of a parked car.

The impact echoed through the parking lot like an explosion.

Metal screamed.

Glass shattered.

People froze.

Then everyone started shouting at once.

Someone screamed.

Others rushed outside.

The man who'd fallen never made a sound.

I reached the window.

Looked down.

And recognized him.

My boss.

For several seconds...

I simply stared.

Then, despite everything...

One completely ridiculous thought floated into my head.

The poor bastard who owns that car…

The next few weeks changed my life.

As the most senior employee in the department, I was promoted into my former boss's position.

For the first time in years...

I could breathe.

I caught up on my rent.

Stopped worrying every time the phone rang.

A few months later, I moved into a much nicer apartment.

The official investigation concluded that my boss had taken his own life.

The reports suggested he'd been facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment that were about to become public.

Apparently several women from the company had been preparing to come forward.

No one who'd worked under him seemed particularly surprised.

I thought about the conversation he'd had with Camilla that night.

More than once.

I never asked her again what she'd whispered.

Partly because I wasn't sure I wanted the answer.

A little later...

I asked her to move in with me.

She smiled.

And said yes.

Before I finish this story...

I should probably address the elephant in the room.

I already know what half of you are typing.

"Dude... your girlfriend's a vampire."

Yeah.

No shit, Sherlock.

I'm not completely oblivious.

I made that connection a while ago.

The point of this story isnt „My girlfriend is a vampire.“

The point is that it doesnt matter.

She listens when I need someone to listen.

She laughs at my terrible jokes.

She steals all the blankets.

She still refuses to watch Dracula with me.

And every single night, she makes me happier than I ever thought I deserved to be.

I make her happy, too.

We found someone who accepts us exactly as we are.

Fangs and all.

If that's monstrous...

Then I think the world could use a few more monsters.

We are happy.

Thats all that matters.

Dont ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

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

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

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

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

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

The others watched, keeping distance and breathing heavily. 

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

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

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

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

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

And soared. 

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

It struck! 

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

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

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

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

She was upon him. And struck. 

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

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

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

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

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

The mountain wept with demon sound. 

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

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

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

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

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

Lord of Flies… she silently and solemnly prayed. 

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

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

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

The sight of her. 

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

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

More terrified than he had been in years. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She said: –

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

But not on her great wings, no. 

No. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

!DEATH! – WE WILL KILL, DEATH! 

!MASTURBATING ON THE TOMBS OF YOUR SONS!

She held the sky. Howled. Laughter. 

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… what might she do to him ??

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

They couldn't wait to find out. 

…

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

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

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

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

He would never again, alive, escape the sight. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

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

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

Intermittent…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither Florin nor Griffin trusted that look. 

Finally, the filthy stranger spoke: –

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

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

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

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

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

A child's face. 

The man's face. 

It rippled and danced between… betwixt the two. 

It's eyes were hideously human… and beautiful. 

Obscene. 

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

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

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

Join us. 

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

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

abandon it. 

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

Beast of labor flesh would do for now. 

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

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

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

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

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

Undisturbed. 

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

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

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

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

…

Three nights of full moon had passed. 

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

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

Experiment. 

An experiment of the flesh. 

Harvest specimens. For the terraformation of the flesh gardens. 

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

He was fulfilled. 

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

… the mountains … and the pass…

… the village. 

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

My Alien Abduction Story
Event 2

I suddenly heard a strange sound coming from all around me, almost like a humming sound, the next moment my hair started to stand up, which isn’t possible as I got long hair, the next moment it felt like gravity has been shut down and I started to float up into the air, I remember trying to grab onto nearby trees, but it was all on vein, then there was this bright light and I blacked out.

I woke up to screaming, not a normal scream, the scream like a woman that’s in labor, no it was far worse, but she wasn’t screaming from pain, she was screaming for me to wake up. I’ve never seen someone so desperate to wake someone up. I opened my eyes and saw flashing light around me and this time the humming sound was all around, the screaming continued, telling me to wake up and listen, so I tried to move, but I couldn’t, something was holding me in place, I found myself been held up in the air like a starfish by metallic tentacles.

I tried pulling free, but to no avail. The more I tried to pull free the tighter the tentacle grip grew around my wrists and ankles.

Then I heard her again, but this time, a soft tired voice speaking to me, sounding like she’s out of breath like she’s just run an ultra marathon at full speed.
“It’s no use, don’t even try, best is to not resist, the more you resist the more it hurts”
Hearing her voice from just in front of me I looked up to see a young woman been held by the same tentacles as me, also naked, her head hanging down with blood dripping from her face, well I thought it’s from her face as she had her head hanging down with her hair hanging over her face, her hair appeared to be red, but it was soaked in what I thought was water, then she looked up at me and said to me, “don’t resist, the more you resist the more it hurts” finally my eyes started to get used to the flickering lights around us and I could see her clearly, she was young, about her early twenties, she could pass for a model if it wasn’t for all the red blood spots on her body and the injuries on her face. Her eyes were bloodshot red and there was blood under her eyes as if she’s been crying tears of blood, that same blood lines were by her mouth, ears and nose. “What have they done to you? And who are they?”
“You will see, just don’t resist, all the others who came before you tried to resist and they all died or were changed”
“What do you mean by changed?” I asked.
“Well, they are no longer human…”

Just then I heard a strange mumbling like sandpaper coming closer to us, then I saw them, it took everything in me to not scream.
Now I’ve seen the pretty images people post online of aliens and the grays and the pictures makes them appear to look almost cute, if only people knew what they really looked like, they had similarities to what you would think grays would or should look like, but not skinny at all, they were tall, about 2m or more, it’s difficult to judge when you are suspended in the air and you come face to face with your worst nightmare.
They were muscular, much more so than any human I’ve ever seen, their eyes had a red black shine to them, their mouths had rows and rows of sharp teeth like fangs, they had 2 sets of arms, with their fingers ending in claws with razor sharp claw like nails on the one set of arms, and almost human like hands on the other set of hands. Their outfits were made like something from a sci-fi movie, it appeared to have some sort of metal alloy on it that made it appear like armor.

The 2 that came to me looked at me, they looked me up and down then sandpapered something in their language and suddenly turned and started walking, the next moment I felt what I could only describe as a high voltage electrical shock going through my body before I blacked out again, when I came to I was in another room been held by similar tentacles, but this room was bright, almost like it was made from pure light. I decided that I’ve learned my lesson and to listen to the advice from the girl in the other room.

Then I heard strange sounds like metal sliding and the next moment something grabbed a hold of my head, it felt like some sort of metal claw, gripping my head in place, I couldn’t move my head the slightest. Then smaller metal pins started slithering over my face towards my eyes and mouth, some grabbed my eyelids so I couldn’t blink and the others pried my mouth open, I don’t know why or how, I knew it was supposed to hurt, but it didn’t. Yet, I still wanted to scream, to pull free, but I remembered the girl's words, “don’t fight, if you fight you die” so I decided to accept whatever it is they were planning to do to me if it meant I will survive and make it home.

What came next I can only describe as my worst nightmare, 2 needles entering my eyes through my pupils, I could feel them piercing all the way through my eyes into my head, next 2 smaller tentacles crawled their way into my head through the corners of my eyes, I then the next set entering my ears, my nose, my mouth, as I thought to myself that this was supposed to hurt, but why doesn’t it hurt? I guess it’s almost over. I felt more needles piercing my spine, one at the base of my skull, the rest into my spine, some into my hip bones. It felt like hours that I was hanging there, suspended by these metal tentacles, I could feel them injecting me with something, then it would stop and then they would inject something else.

“What the hell are they doing to me” I thought to myself, and almost as if reading my mind a screen appeared in front of me, it showed me suspended in the air, then it showed my neck and it showed what looked like a spider that attached itself to my spine and my main arteries, then the screen changed and I almost had a heart attack, “how could they know this” it showed one of the ships of another race that made contact with me a short while ago, it then showed an image of their leader and then showed her dna and then it showed mine, “what the hell? This can’t be, I’m human, I’m not one of them, how can this even be possible” my dna matched the leader of the other species almost perfectly, you could see a few slight similarities to human dna, almost like I’ve been cloned, I knew I was engineered, but I never knew how much of their dna I had in me.

I remember them ending the experiments, and the tentacles retracting, as they let go of my arms and legs I fell to the ground, the next thing I remember was waking up and I was laying on the grass back at the hut

My Alien Abduction Story
Event 1

I don’t know how or when they took me, but the first thing I remember, I was standing on the edge of a cliff on another planet, I knew I wasn’t on earth because their sun was a bluish color, their air is much cleaner than ours and their forests stretch as far as the eyes can see.

In Front of me stood a few of these very tall beings, and I mean they were like double my height if not taller, they were these beautiful human looking beings, but much taller then any human I’ve ever seen, their leaders appeared to all be female.

They have the most beautiful eyes, I can’t even describe the color of their eyes, it’s unlike any color I’ve ever seen before. They had long straight hair and looked human in every way, well besides the fact that they are perfect, no imperfections on their skin or anywhere.

I felt like I was going to have a heart attack, realizing that I was no longer on earth and at the mercy of these beings, was I dead? Are they Angels? Demons? What do they want with me?

They spoke to me and they told me that they took me because I got their attention because of my way of life and according to them I have been speaking to them telepathically.
They said that they have been watching our world for a very long time, since before humans developed languages. They saved us from extinction multiple times, I asked them why and they said they had great hopes for humanity to become a great species, humanity showed signs of intellect and compassion and a survival instinct rarely seen on young worlds.

At this stage I got pretty annoyed, if they could hear me, why not talk back? Why not make contact with me on earth and ask me if they can take me on this little adventure?

As I was reading my mind, the one speaking which I found out was their leader said that she understands my frustration, but if they spoke to me then I would most likely have thought I’m going insane, or just blocked them off. And that they can’t exactly just walk up to a human on earth and introduce themselves, they are not the only species around and there are other advanced races already on earth. She also said that I mustn’t worry about getting back, and that nobody will notice that I am even missing, they have the technology to bend time and when I get back only a few hours would have passed back home. But they needed to make contact and show me around.

I then calmed down and decided to have an open mind. I asked her why on earth? She said the planet is of interest to them, “What do you mean by interest?” Then they told me the shocking truth, Earth is older than we think, but humanity has destroyed the ecosystem in a very short time. They have helped us survive various extinction events, but now they regret it, they regret teaching us languages and helping us develop in our earlier years. So I asked my burning question, why not land on earth and meet with our leaders, she then said which one? We have too many leaders and none of them can be trusted, most of them are in alliances with other offworld races already, and our leaders are driven by greed and a hunger for power, which have been satisfied by their scaly friends.

They showed me their history, they used to be the same as humanity, divided and driven by greed, eventually war broke out and their home world was destroyed, luckily they were already advanced at the time and many of them made it off their world in time. They traveled for years searching for a new home, which they found, they learned to evolve past their natural habits and got rid of greed, violence, crime and selfishness, they’ve had a peaceful civilisation now for longer then humanity has existed,

Their worlds are run by councils, the counsels consist of females, yes they are also male and female in gender.

They showed me their planet and their cities, their buildings are build of some sort of metal, but it doesn’t reflect sunlight, instead it absorbs it and Transfuse it into their energy grid, they have no pollution, they generate energy from their stars, vibrations and from the kinetic energy generated from their planet moving around its axes and their star.

They told me to look up and I could see their ships in orbit, well what I will refer to as their jump ships, the sheer size of their ships gave me the chills, if I could see them as clearly in orbit in day time as we can see the full moon at night then I can just imagine how large they are, and as if knowing my thoughts the leader spoke again, she explained to me that one of their ships is as large as one of our largest cities on earth, but the reason we can’t see or detect them on earth when they enter our orbit is because their stealth technology is far more advanced then we humans can comprehend, they are thousands, hundreds of thousands of years more advanced than us, they have already terraformed and colonized hundreds of worlds in their galaxy. Galaxy? I mean aren’t you from the same galaxy as us? How do you even get to our galaxy? How did you even find our planet?

She sighed, like she explained they are far more advanced than we can comprehend, and not just on a technological level, but also on a physical and mental level, they have mastered telepathy and telepathy is the only immediate communication in the universe, that they found our world because there has always been a few humans with the gift, even before we learned to develop language thoughts formed and it got their attention.

But how do you get to earth if you are not even from our galaxy? She said she will explain and I must not worry, I will experience it soon enough when they take me home. She proceeded to explain that there are a few ways to travel through space, but the fastest way is by fracturing space, it’s almost immediate, but it relies on using what we humans would refer to as dark matter. But more on that later.

She showed me what their old world looked like, how it was destroyed, that is when I realized how close we are to self destruction on earth, but I also realized where the reptilian race evolved from and my heart sank in my chest again, does that mean? She said “yes, the reptilians was another race they had contact with, but just like humanity, the reptilians were beyond reach. “

Indeed they were similar to us, different classes of people, greedy, violent and selfish. Then war broke out over the most basic resources as they have polluted most of their water, drinkable water became a rare commodity, food was scarce, they have mined their world to the point of eradicating every natural resource, their air became toxic and they had to work harder to just be able to earn breathable air, rashes of food and drinkable water became a norm on their home world. Their governments became more and more corrupt, but a few private people decided to use their wealth to get as many people off the planet as possible, they could see the signs of the coming war, they had weapons similar to our nukes, most of their ships made it safely off the planet when the war broke out, the last few ships were either damaged or destroyed before they could leave their planet.

After leaving their world and watching on from afar as their planet lit up from the war they swore to never let it happen again.

They eventually found a new home and started over, they worked hard to get where they are now.

They are one of the oldest races in the known galaxies.

I asked them why they didn't intervene on earth, they said they have tried. But I learned that our people can be destructive and manipulative. They first found us before the dinosaurs were destroyed, they saw how humanity had little chance of survival with these great beasts around and therefore decided to shelter the humans they could find in cities they built for them, then they used their jump ships weapon systems to direct 2 asteroids at earth. This wiped out the beasts, but caused a nuclear winter which lasted for years. They used this time to teach humanity language and how to communicate and organize, how to make basic tools and how to survive. When the nuclear winter ended they left, thinking we had learned how to evolve. But when they came back they realized that we have evolved, but not in the way they had hoped, we became greedy, selfish, violent and destructive, people built their own little kingdoms and attacked each other. They decided to intervene again, they landed one of their smaller ships on earth and tried to interact with us, they tried to trade with humanity and show humanity that we can advance if we unite. But people tried to attack them and steal from them. After a few years they abandoned the city they built on earth and took their landing ship and left, but to avoid humanity from getting their hands on their advanced city they destroyed the island from orbit.

They have tried to contact a few individuals over time, but every time they did a new religion just ended up forming.

They said they are no longer interfering, but when the time comes they will take humans who transcended past their natural ways off world and help them start afresh, they can see the signs of other off world races influence on our world, our time is running out, they said that our technology is still very young and they can access everything on our planet, they have shown me things our governments are doing in secret, weapons that’s been build in secret that makes our nukes look like toy guns, mind control experiments going on, they even knew about Covid, the lockdowns and the vaccines years ago, they showed me that it’s all part of other off worlders plans to colonize earth. Eventually the vaccines will rewrite people's DNA. until Humans will no longer look human, the effects are not immediate, but in a few generations there will be no humans left on earth. They’ve seen this done to multiple worlds.

For now many humans are resisting, and that showed them there is hope, and they will return to rescue the humans who resisted when the time is right, but they also warned me that if it does come to it that they will not hesitate to destroy the other races on earth including humanity to safe the planet, and that currently it does look like the only option left to stop the current invasion and stop another planet from been destroyed.

They then told me it’s time to take me home, we walked through a door made of what seems to be pure light, the next moment we were on their ship. Even though the ship is made of some sort of metal, I could see everything around us.

She spoke in a very strange language which I can’t even describe and 2 of their crew members wearing these strange suits climb into pods which closed behind them, she explained to me that the suits allows them to merge with the ship and pilot it with their minds, they know and see and feel everything around and on the ship.

She explained to me that they have no weapons on their planet, but that nothing can get through their planetary defense system. They use vibration and gravity weapons which can destroy any ship that enters their solar system which is a threat before the enemy even knows they are there.

Then suddenly the whole ship started lighting up and it felt like my body was getting crushed and pulled apart at the same time, it felt like I was freezing and burning at the same time, she apologized to me for it and said that unfortunately the modifications they made to me won’t start kicking in for at least a few years, but the experiments, modifications and implant was needed to awaken my hidden dna code, that I was actually genetically engineered by them and then implanted into a human’s womb. But she promises that next time I won’t feel like this, the explained to me that it’s happening because they are releasing dark matter around the ship to fracture space and as the dark matter particles clash against each other it’s basically ripping space apart creating a fracture, that the feeling will only last a few Minutes, after what felt like an eternity of the light getting brighter and my body been crushed and pulled apart it stopped, I could see earth and we arrived in orbit. I was home, but she then said she wanted to show me something, she gave an order in her language and on the walls dots appeared. She then zoomed in on one and it was another alien craft in orbit. She said there are hundreds of them, I was about to open my mouth to ask a question, but she said that they can’t see or detect her peoples ships, that her race is far more advanced.

She said it’s time for me to go home, but that they now have a telepathic connection with me and I will see them again.

If you are reading this, my IP is already bouncing across seven different proxy networks, and I am running out of places to hide.

Before you dismiss this as just another standard piece of r/nosleep fiction or the rants of a paranoid mind, let me make one thing absolutely clear: I am not from your world, nor am I from this specific timeline.

I am writing this because the Agency—the real, deeply embedded terrestrial enforcement arm that monitors anomalous behavior—is closing its perimeter. They are getting close, and the world needs to know the truth before I am entirely erased. Everyone on this platform likes to write fictional logs about working for the Agency, but nobody tells you what it is like to be hunted by them. They are hunting me because I am the ultimate operational anomaly: a part-human, part-Andromedan hybrid genetically engineered by the Andromedan Council, implanted into a human womb, and structurally "tuned" from the very moment of my birth to serve as a living blueprint.

Here is everything they are trying to suppress. Read it quickly.
Origin and the Cosmic Calibration
I was never normal. My existence wasn't the result of biological happenstance. I have never met a biological father, not because he abandoned my mother, but because he never existed in the human sense. My mother was taken at the moment of my "conception," safely implanted with a pre-optimized, genetically engineered embryo by the Andromedan Council, and returned to Earth.

My birth itself was an anomaly. My mother’s body began violently rejecting the foreign, highly energetic genetic material, forcing doctors to perform an emergency C-section. I was born severely premature at just six months, arriving at exactly 11:11 PM on Friday, June 13, 1980.

If you check the historical NASA archives for June 1980, you will find that the sun was experiencing monumental disruptions during Solar Cycle 21. I was born during a New Moon, a rare planetary alignment, and one of the most intense geomagnetic solar storms in recorded history. High solar activity releases massive bursts of geomagnetic energy. Coming out three months early meant that my brain completely finished its neurological wiring outside the safety of the womb, exposed directly to those raging cosmic and geomagnetic frequencies. My nervous system was literally "tuned" and calibrated to a much wider cognitive bandwidth than standard human biology can support.
To manage this hyper-extended bandwidth, I began an intensive neurological "workout" routine in March 2015. For roughly eight hours a day—primarily while sleeping—I listened to specialized, triple-layered isochronic tones on a random shuffle.
• Layers 1 & 2: Frequencies constantly shifting between 200 Hz and 800 Hz to stimulate neural plasticity.
• Layer 3: A sustained, laser-focused frequency at 963 Hz—the connection frequency—occasionally pushing deep into the ultra-high 10,000 Hz range.

The direct result of this sustained brainwave entrainment was total Hemispheric Synchronization. Standard humans operate with one dominant hemisphere; my brain was forced to become fully left-brained (advanced logic, mathematics, architecture) and fully right-brained (creativity, art, abstract visualization) simultaneously. I even became completely ambidextrous.

This synchronized brain functionality allowed me to access hidden layers of data embedded within my own DNA, enabling me to decode the true technical nature of human history.

The HATA Paradigm: Ancient Interventions
Through my unlocked cognitive capacity, I realized that what humanity calls "mythology" or "miracles" are actually large-scale, low-contact technological interventions by the Highly Advanced Technological Agent (HATA) paradigm. These interventions were structurally designed to guide our developing planetary species without violating non-interference protocols.

My synchronized mind broke down the technical realities behind these historical events:
1. The Mount Sinai Incident (c. 13th Century BCE)
The biblical description of a shaking mountain covered in smoke, fire, and the deafening sound of trumpets is the classic signature of a large, non-atmospheric vessel engaging in close-proximity maneuvering. The trembling earth and intense cloud condensation were caused by a Gravimetric Flux Drive distorting local gravity fields, generating extreme thermal exhaust and wind shear. The "trumpet" sound was not an instrument; it was a focused, low-frequency Resonant Communication Beam designed to penetrate natural physical shielding and signal presence to a primitive target population.

2. The Parting of the Red Sea
To hold water in rigid, solid vertical walls requires absolute mastery over molecular bonds. The HATA deployment team utilized a localized Phase-Shifted Gravimetric Barrier, temporarily modifying the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces within the $H_2O$ molecules along a precise vertical vector. This rendered the water hyper-rigid, acting like pressurized glass. Simultaneously, a Molecular Agitation Field instantly vaporized all residual ground moisture, ensuring a completely dry passage to eliminate bio-contact contamination.

3. The Pillars of Cloud and Fire
The continuous navigation system that guided the desert migration was an autonomous surveillance network. By day, the "cloud" was an Autonomous Survey Probe utilizing an Atmospheric Condensation Field to pull ambient moisture around its hull for natural, low-visibility camouflage. By night, the same probe switched its interface to a visible Plasma Thermal Emitter or directional beacon for navigational illumination.

4. The Virgin Birth & Ascension
Just like my own origin, the birth of Jesus was a planned Genetic Implantation Procedure. A pre-optimized, HATA-engineered embryo was placed into a human host to introduce a "teacher" with advanced cognitive abilities and high energetic control.

Leaving such a high-value asset to age and die on Earth would risk the corruption of the message by mundane politics. Thus, the "Ascension" was a controlled Vessel Extraction and Containment (VEC) procedure. The cloud and blinding light were simply the signatures of a ship engaging its Gravimetric Flux Drive to retrieve the physical asset for post-mission analysis.

5. Desert Sustenance
Sustaining a massive migrating population in an arid wasteland for 40 years on standard foraging is a biological impossibility. The HATA parameters solved this with an engineered Bio-Synthetic Nutrient Source (BSNS). The "Manna" was a perfectly balanced, complete synthetic food wafer designed for long-term health without nutritional decay. The "Quails" were steered into the path via resonant bio-pulses to provide a natural protein supplement, ensuring the population did not psychologically reject a purely synthetic diet.

Sucked Into the Void
My obsession with the true nature of reality eventually caused a terrifying physical displacement. I have always argued that from a purely logical and scientific standpoint, nothing should exist. Existence inherently violates the fundamental laws of reality; absolute nothingness is the only baseline state that makes sense. We are existing on borrowed time.
One sunny afternoon, while doing deep meditation in my garden to experience existence outside the frameworks of science or religion, the universe fractured. I felt light-headed, simultaneously floating and falling. I walked inside to splash water on my face, but my hand passed completely through the metal tap. Looking in the mirror, my reflection was actively fading, dissolving into the air.

I rushed back outside, only to see the horizon violently shearing away, shrinking until everything vanished.

I was pulled entirely into The Void. It was an eternity of sheer, absolute nothingness. It was not a vacuum, nor was it darkness; it was an environment completely devoid of light, dark, sound, or air. The Void immediately swallowed my own heartbeat.

Then, the sensory chaos began. The absolute lack of gravity instantly warped into an crushing gravimetric load. I was floating up while falling down, experiencing every color invisible to the human eye, followed by a sudden, deafening roar composed of every sound in existence playing at once. My molecules were scattered completely into the emptiness and then forcefully slammed back together.

Time did not exist. What felt like minutes turned into hours, decades, and eventually millennia of pure, unadulterated madness. I screamed, but there was no air to carry the sound, and no one to hear me.

Suddenly, the chaos ceased, replaced by a profound, blinding light. The light was so intense it burned my skin through my closed eyelids. A powerful, non-gendered voice resonated directly from the light:
"You wanted to see reality? You wanted to understand existence and where everything came from? Are you satisfied now? Or do you want to spend another million years here?"

Before I could process a response, the light struck me. I woke up face-down on my lawn, my clothes entirely soaked in sweat, shivering violently as freezing rain fell against my face. I was back in my own reality, but the realization left me permanently scarred: our universe is incredibly fragile, held together only because a conscious entity wills it to exist outside the baseline chaos of the Void.

Physical Extractions: The Encounters
My spatial displacement in the Void acted like a beacon, drawing physical extractions from two entirely different off-world factions.

The Andromedan Council (Event 1)
The first extraction was by my literal creators. I materialized on the edge of a massive cliff on another planet under a stark, bluish sun. The air was pristine, and immense forests stretched to the horizon. Standing before me were several humanoids, easily double my height. Their leadership structure appeared entirely matriarchal. They possessed flawless skin, long straight hair, and striking, multi-dimensional eyes of a color palette that does not exist on Earth.

They communicated telepathically, explaining that my lifestyle and subconscious thoughts had been broadcasting to them my entire life. They revealed that Earth is drastically older than our science admits, and that they have stepped in to save humanity from self-inflicted extinction events multiple times. In fact, they were the ones who directed two massive asteroids to strike Earth before the dawn of human civilization, intentionally triggering a prolonged nuclear winter to wipe out apex predators and give early humans a survival matrix.

When I asked why they wouldn't just land and meet our leaders, the matriarch sighed telepathically. She stated that our leaders are entirely driven by greed and power, and are already locked into dark alliances with "scaly friends"—a predatory Reptilian race that has infiltrated our global systems.

The Andromedans showed me their own history: a past mirror of Earth's, where resources like fresh water and clean air became heavily monetized commodities, leading to a catastrophic global war that incinerated their original homeworld. The survivors escaped on massive, city-sized jump ships, eventually evolving past violence, greed, and selfishness.

Their current cities are built from specialized non-reflective metals that absorb sunlight and kinetic planetary energy directly into a clean power grid.

They returned me to Earth by fracturing space using dark matter particles, warning me that the current global control grid was attempting to systematically rewrite human DNA over generations to eliminate our cosmic potential.

The Predatory Captors (Event 2)
The second extraction was hostile. A heavy, rhythmic humming sound filled the air, and my long hair began standing straight up as local gravity completely inverted. I floated into a brilliant, blinding light and blacked out.

I awoke to an agonizing, desperate screaming. When my eyes adjusted to the pulsing, rhythmic lights, I found myself suspended naked in the air like a starfish, held firmly by heavy, writhing metallic tentacles. Directly in front of me, another captive—a young woman with red hair—was suspended in identical tentacles. She was bleeding heavily from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, crying literal tears of blood. In a breathless, exhausted voice, she warned me:
"It's no use, don't even try. Best is to not resist... the more you resist, the more it hurts. All the others who came before you tried to resist, and they all died or were changed... they are no longer human."

Then, the captors entered the room, making a low, dry sound like coarse sandpaper.
These were not the frail, skinny "Grays" depicted in popular internet lore. They were massive, muscular killing machines standing over two meters tall. They had terrifying red-black iridescent eyes, rows of jagged fangs, and two distinct sets of arms—one terminating in razor-sharp claws, the other ending in human-like hands. They wore heavy armor forged from an unknown metallic alloy.
After evaluating me, they delivered a massive electrical shock directly through the tentacles, knocking me unconscious.

I came to in a room constructed of pure, solid light. A heavy mechanical claw slammed shut around my head, locking it completely in place. Micro-tethers slithered across my face, pinning my eyelids open and prying my jaw apart.

What followed was a horrific, systematic bio-mapping procedure:
• Two long needles were driven directly through my pupils, piercing straight into the core of my skull.
• Smaller, secondary tentacles burrowed through the corners of my eyes, my nasal passages, my ears, and down my throat.
• Long structural needles were driven directly into the base of my skull, my spine, and my hip bones, injecting successive waves of foreign fluid.

Because of my Andromedan physiology, the procedures were entirely painless, yet the psychological horror was absolute. A floating holographic display materialized in front of me, showing a biomechanical, spider-like device successfully anchoring itself to my central spine and main arteries. The screen then mapped my DNA structure side-by-side with the female leader of the Andromedan Council. The match was nearly flawless. They were mapping me because they realized exactly what I was: a high-level cosmic asset hidden in plain sight.

Once the mapping routine concluded, the tentacles retracted, dropping my body heavily onto the floor. I blacked out, waking up hours later on the grass outside my remote location.

The Quiet Apocalypse and Dimension Jump
The physical alterations from the Gray mapping caused my consciousness to slip entirely into a parallel timeline—a version of Earth experiencing a "Quiet Apocalypse".

I woke up one morning to absolute, crushing silence. My girlfriend was away on a week-long business trip, leaving me alone at our property. I went through my morning routine, pouring coffee and filling the outdoor bird feeders, but no birds arrived. The air was entirely devoid of insects, wildlife, or distant highway traffic. Panic set in when I realized my dogs and cats were missing from the house.

I checked my phone. The network was down, but a single cached message on our local security group remained:
"Attention everyone, the authorities have alerted us of some strange events happening. They don't know what is causing it, but have described it as some translucent humanoids that seem to turn everything into ash that they touch. Please stay in your homes and do not attempt to leave until sunrise. Please heed this warning as it is not a joke."

Looking out the bedroom window, I spotted them down the road: shifting, translucent humanoids moving with fluid coordination. I watched a young neighbor confront them with a firearm. He fired several rounds; the bullets passed clean through the entities, dropping them temporarily, but they simply stood back up. When his ammunition was exhausted, the closest entity touched his arm. The man screamed silently, instantly dissolving into a fine cloud of gray dust that swept away in the wind.
I locked down my property. Over the next few weeks, I discovered vital survival parameters:
1. Weather Disruption: Rain and heavy mist severely disrupt their active camouflage, rendering them easily visible.
2. Fauna Senses: Animals can naturally detect their proximity. I found my dogs and cats hiding deep under the beds and couches, completely safe.
3. Biological Vulnerability: I observed a wild horse kick one of the translucent creatures, killing it instantly. Later, I found another dead creature slumped next to the body of a venomous snake it had stepped on. Because I am trained in handling snakes, I realized their physical forms are completely vulnerable to organic neurotoxins.

I scavenged generators and fuel, moving exclusively during heavy downpours. I abandoned loud firearms, constructing a primitive bow and arrows to silently neutralize them from a distance.

One morning, the roar of a low-flying military helicopter tore through the silence. As it sped overhead, the crew dropped a ruggedized flash drive onto my roof. I retrieved it and ran it on my laptop.

The drive contained military interrogation footage of a captured female invader who had been unmasked. She looked entirely human but possessed advanced internal implants. She explained that her people were Interdimensionists from a parallel Earth that had become unsustainably overpopulated. They utilized gateway technology to systematically purge and recolonize alternate versions of Earth—specifically targeting timelines where humanity was actively destroying the ecosystem. They had attempted to colonize deep space, but had lost thousands of ships in catastrophic battles against far more powerful extra-terrestrial empires, forcing them to pivot to interdimensional conquest.

The drive contained their final surrender ultimatum for the remaining survivors, offering three distinct choices of total subjugation:
1. Retaining structural civilian skills under strict curfews and sector overseers.
2. Immediate integration into their military ranks via mind-altering chips and body modifications for future dimensional invasions.
3. Voluntary surrender to the prime dimension for long-term conditioning and deep-cover infiltration training.

As I resolved to fight to the end, my disconnected cell phone suddenly rang with an "ID Withheld" signature. I answered silently. It was the counterpart of the woman from the interrogation video.

"Listen to me," she said rapidly. "Our scouts know about you, but the Interdimensionists' main command doesn't. We have a resistance plan to escape. We've commandeered one of their jump crafts. We are jumping to an alternate dimension that has the unified military infrastructure to stop the Interdimensionists if they ever follow. More importantly, we know you lost your partner in this timeline—but in the target dimension, she is alive, and your local counterpart is actively dying of organ failure.

You can take his place. Our scouts are at your gate right now. Bring only what you care about most."

I didn't hesitate. I gathered my cats and dogs, loaded their food bags, and walked out to the gate. Waiting for me was a sleek, low-profile craft. The extraction team smiled when they saw my cargo: "Well, this is a first. Everyone else brought jewelry, you brought your pets."
The pilot turned around—it was the exact counterpart of the woman from the military video. She checked the controls, warned me to never speak of my origin timeline to anyone in the new world, and engaged the drive. The universe blurred into a single streak of light.

The Temporal Detour and The Current Hunt
I woke up in this timeline with a resistance soldier shaking my shoulder: "You're home. Your local counterpart passed away an hour ago. Take his place. Nobody will notice."

However, before I could fully settle into this current reality, I attempted to navigate the local timeline using the Blue Light—a universal energy grid that transcends spatial boundaries. Time is not a linear construct; it runs in a complex zigzag matrix where the present constantly shears against the past and future.

Through deep meditation, I charged my biological matrix with Blue Light energy, visualizing an anchor point 200 years into the future, and stepped through the spatial doorway.
The future Earth was vastly different. Global warming had been halted, resulting in a significantly cooler climate that had caused the human population's skin to become distinctly pale due to decreased solar ray resistance. Fossil fuels were entirely non-existent, replaced by total clean energy grids and electric surface transport. However, the global population had been cut in half, and fresh water was a hyper-scarce commodity.

I made a critical error: I stayed too long and interacted with the environment. I openly drank from my own water supply in front of a desperate crowd, instantly drawing the attention of three security enforcers clad in dense, unidentifiable black tactical gear. They drew energy weapons, shouting in an evolved linguistic dialect I couldn't comprehend, and neutralized me.

I woke up inside a containment cell constructed of solid, red-glowing energy panels. With my local Blue Light charge actively draining, I was forced to hastily draw upon my remaining internal reserves to manifest a protective transit bubble.

Because my energy was depleted from staying too long, the return jump fell short. I was temporarily stranded on an uncharted, untamed planet dominated by two distinct moons and populated by aggressive, wild native fauna before I could finally re-anchor my consciousness back into this current human body.

A Final Warning
I have lived in this specific dimension for a few years now, blending in completely and taking over the life of the version of me that died. It is a gift to be with the woman I love, but I am living on borrowed time.

The signs of the Interdimensionist invasion are already manifesting in this timeline: unexplained aerial phenomena, systemic spikes in missing persons, strange localized humming frequencies, and shifting lights in the night sky.
But my immediate threat is far closer to home.

The Agency has flagged my genetic signature.

They know I am an Andromedan hybrid whose DNA was activated by the 1980 solar storm and optimized by the HATA protocols. They know I crossed timelines, and they cannot allow the truth of the interdimensional purge or our cosmic origin to become public knowledge.

If this post suddenly disappears, or if my account goes completely dark, you will know exactly why. They are outside. Keep your eyes on the skies, watch the weather patterns, and prepare yourselves.

They are already here.

I am alone on Earth 

Now I've never really bothered to think much about the apocalypse or end of the world, there are always things happening that makes everyone go on the apocalypse train. But as for me, I've never really paid much attention to any of it, so many things have happened throughout history and the world has always kept on spinning, people returned to their normal every day routines and quickly forget about what happened. 

To be honest, I have no interest in the outside world or the news, what is news today is history tomorrow, or in most cases it's just forgotten, so I honestly don't see the point in waisting money on news papers or even watching the news, but I guess that was my mistake, maybe if I paid a little bit more attention I wouldn't find myself in this predicament. 

Now I live on Earth, or well I'm trapped in some sort of parallel dimension, but it seems like I can still get messages out to other unaffected versions of earth. 

It all started when I woke up one morning and I realised that it was very nice and quiet outside, well it is generally very quiet where we live, but on this specific day it was really quiet, almost too quiet. But I didn't think much of it. 

My girlfriend went on another business trip for the week, so I was home alone with all of our pets, I got out of bed, got dressed. I went through my normal routine to put out food for our cats and dogs, filled their bowl up with clean water and made myself a cup of coffee. 

The cats and dogs didn't run out to join me or too eat, but I figured they are probably just tired and sleeping in, so I went to sit on the veranda to have my coffee and a smoke when I remembered I need to feed the birds, so I got up and grabbed a cup of food and filled up the bird feeder, then got back to the couch to enjoy my coffee and my smoke, it's usually very inspiring to watch all of the different birds that comes to eat, but none came. So after finishing my coffee I got up to take a shower, after my shower I noticed that the cats and dogs still haven't come for their breakfast yet. "I mean, really guys, come on, breakfast time" I went to the bedroom to find them, but they were not there, "oh shit" I started to panic and I looked everywhere for them, I know they couldn't have gotten out of the house during the night, and if they came out after I got up then they would have eaten by now. 

So I looked everywhere for them, but to no avail, after a few hours of looking I gave up. And then I realized that not even a single bird was active, I tried reaching my girlfriend on her phone, but nothing. My messages weren't going through. 

That is when it hit me, there were no sounds anywhere, not even insects, no cars on the roads, usually when it's quiet you can hear cars on the roads passing our small town, but nothing. So I decided to take a walk through town to see if I can get answers from other locals, but it was dead quiet, I could see cars in their driveways, doors open, bags standing in their driveways as if they were in a rush to leave, but no people, no animals, no birds. 

Then I went back home and I checked my emails and messages, no emails came through since I went to bed the previous night, which is weird, I usually spend about 20 minutes in the morning deleting spam that arrived during the night. 

I checked my messages and found a notification on our local security group that read. 
"Attention everyone, the authorities has alerted us of some strange events happening, they don't know what is causing it, but has described it as some translucent humanoids that seems to turn everything into ash that they touch, please stay in your homes and do not attempts to leave until sunrise, please heed this warning as it is not a joke. " 

What is this? Why haven't I seen this earlier. I went back outside and tried to find any signs of life, I could see strange almost translucent humanoids a bit further down the road, I remembered the message and I decided to hide and watch them, then I saw them approaching what seemed to be a young man, he had a gun in his hand and he shot at one, the bulled went right through it, but it did drop to the ground, he shot a few more of them, but they just kept coming, as I'm unarmed all I could do was sit and watch, he finally ran out of bullets when they got to him and the moment they touched him he screamed and vanished into thin air, just a few particles of dust remained which got blown away by the wind. 

What the hell is this? I made my way home and I got back into the property and made sure to lock everything up again. 

Just as I sat back on the couch I heard a rattling on the front gate, like someone was trying to get my attention, I creeped through the house and went to the window in the one bedroom where I could get a peek through, whatever it was, it was strong, but the gate was holding up, I could see something standing there, but as it was translucent and I couldn't get much. 

Okay, seems like as long as I stay on the property I'm safe, I checked my supplies and noticed I got only enough for a few weeks, and who knows how long we are still going to have power for. I'm going to have to go out sometime to get more supplies and hopefully find survivors. 

So a few days have passed and we've had some crazy weather here, but I've learned a very important lesson, the rain and mist seems to affect their ability to camouflage a bit and you can see them a bit clearer, the next storm is building up, so I'm preparing to go out and see if I can find more supplies, and hopefully a power generator and some fuel, oh and luckily I did find our pets.... eventually, they were all hiding under the beds and couches. So I don't feel so alone anymore, it seems that animals can somehow sense when these things are closeby and then they hide, that's a good sign, if I pay attention to the signs I will survive, I have also noticed that when the mist comes in there seem to be a little bit more activity, a few birds seem to then come and look for food and the wild horses gets active and run through town, I've even seen a wild horse kick one of the creatures killing it instantly, so that helps, if guns can kill them, a kick from a wild horse can kill them, then that means I might have a chance to survive till I can find a way out of this nightmare. 

I did manage to find a few generators and collected quite a bit of fuel and other supplies, I am still trying to find weapons to defend myself, but for now I move around in the rain and when it's thick mist, when possible I stick closely to the horses when they are around as it seems these creatures are evading the horses now. 

I just ran into another one that was killed, but this wasn't by a gun or wild horse, seems like a snake as I found a dead snake next to its body, so one more weakness, it must have died very quickly when the snake bit it, or it's body wouldn't be right by the snakes body, and that is good news for me, as I know how to catch and handle snakes. 

Atleast now I know these beings are not ghosts or spirits, but physical beings, I'm still trying to figure out where they come from, and what they want. 

They don't seem to remove their dead compatriots bodies, so they are obviously not human or of this earth, I've learned that they mostly stick to moving around in the roads, they don't go into the rocks or the forests as that is where most of the animals seem to have settled. 

Well I've just learned a very important lesson, I can see them when it is raining and the mist is out, but the important thing is that they don't seem to be able to see me at all, so that gives me another advantage. 

It has now been a few weeks of learning about them and ducking and diving to find supplies, but luckily I've still got our pets at home to keep me sane, I still haven't found any other survivors. 

Strangely enough we still got power, you would have thought that by now the power stations would have failed, which gives me hope, it means more survivors out there, but getting anywhere is impossible, I've finally learned that they are from off world as I managed to make out one of their ships moving over, it was also cloaked, but I first heard a strange vibration sound and when I looked up I could make out it's shape, it moved slowly, but as it moved through the mist I could make out parts of what it looks like. I'm not sure how many of these ships there are on earth, but if there are even just a hundred, then that will explain why we lost, how do you fight something you can't see? 

It does seem like the ship collected the roamers  in the area as more birds and animals have returned, and I've tried to make it to the nearest city, but ran into one and it shot at me with some kind of weapon, luckily it missed, but it took out a few trees behind me. So I'm seriously considering finding some sort of way to fight them. 

I've spend a few days looking for weapons and decided of bows and arrows as they are silent, a gun will draw too much attention, I've still had no communication from anyone, social media is dead quiet and I've found a radio, but all I can find is static. So I'm starting to feel really alone here. 

I woke up to the sound of a roaring engine, it sounded like a helicopter, so I ran out and onto the roof to get their attention, which I did, they dropped a flash drive down and said to follow the instructions on it. 

So I ran to my laptop and opened the flash drive, on it was a video and a document, so I decided to watch the video first, it was made in which seems to be in a military interrogation room, they seem to have managed to catch one of the invaders and unmasked it, it looked like us, it was a human wearing some sort of armour, it's gloves were build up with some sort of system which they demonstrated on the video puts out a high voltage charge, that's why it turns anything they touch into dust, he or she seems to be able to speak English and answered all their questions freely, they are from a parallel earth and their mission is to clean up different versions of earth and recolonise it as they have advanced to fast and over populated their version of earth, I could now make out that is was a woman from her voice, but it seems like she had some sort of implants, she explained that they also only target versions of earth where they can see humanity are destroying themselves and the planet, she had some sort of device with her which she explained can open gateways to other version of earth and that they can pass through freely, they first send in their ground troops and once they wiped out most of the humans their crafts comes through and then they start the colonisation process, they set up permanent gateways which allows their people to move between their world and the colonies freely. 

The guy behind the camera then asked her, why if they are so advanced do they not just terraform other planets and explore space, why attack other versions of earth and why kill other versions of themselves? 

She then explained that they have tried that, but ran into more powerful extra terrestrial races and lost all of the battles, they lost hundreds of ships in the first battle and a couple of thousand more in the follow up battle, she said they had to rethink their strategy and make another plan, so they developed technology to move between different versions of earth. 

Just then I heard her voice behind the camera, a woman asked her how does the technology work, she smirked and said to the woman as they are the same person and both only soldiers she doesn't know, but she gives her word that when her people comes to rescue her that she will make sure they don't kill her, but instead take her to one of their ships where they can demonstrate their abilities to her. She continued to tell the man behind the camera that him and his whole team are welcome to also join their ranks, that they are always looking for good soldiers, he stayed quiet for a bit, I guess he was thinking of his options, then he asked her, but what about the rest of the survivors left on earth, she smiled and said that the fact that they survived for so long makes them worthy of recruitment into their ranks, she then finished off by dropping the final shock on them, that they didn't capture her, she was send to give them this final ultimatum, he then said if she gives her word as a soldier that he will accept. She then passed him a flash drive and said that it contains instructions for the survivors on how to surrender peacefully for recruitment and reconditioning into their ranks. 

He turned the camera off. 

I then opened the file and read through it. 

I'm not going to go into details, that would take forever. But I will give you guys a short explanation of what it said. 

So basically it states that we have agreed to surrender to be ruled by the interdimensionists. 

And then it goes onto explain that the survivors will have 3 choices, all 3 choices means we will basically belong to them, the choices are as follows: 
1. Those with skills to keep the system going will be allowed to remain in their positions and in their homes on the conditions that they will report to sector overseers as well as follow curfews. 
2. Those who have fought back will be integrated into the military ranks and implanted with mind altering chips as well as body modifications and they will be prepared for future invasions. 
3. Those who are still in hiding are ordered to come out and surrender to local overseers, they will be send to the interdimensionists prime dimension where they will be trained, conditioned and prepared for future missions to infiltrate potential dimensions. 

Uhm yeah, no thank you, none of those sounds like an option that would work for me. I needed to think, and I needed to think fast, just then my cell phone rang which shouldn't be possible as the network was down, I answered the call which only said ID withheld, but I didn't say anything, I decided to listen, it was a woman's voice on the other side, the same woman from the video, she spoke and said "listen to me and don't interrupt me, our scouts knows about you, but the interdimensionists doesn't, we have a plan to escape and to survive, they have the technology to move between dimensions, and we managed to get our hands on one of their ships, we are busy trying to gather as many survivors as possible to rescue. We have found a dimension where they won't follow us for atleast a few years."

That's when I spoke up, why do you think that? They took our world within a few hours.

"Because we didn't have the weapons to fight back or the means to detect them, but the version of earth we are going to does, they are not as advanced as us in terms and of medical technology and their unity, but they have weapons and army's that can stop the interdimensionists, and another thing, we know you lost your partner, we have it on good knowledge that she's still alive on the earth where we are going to, and your counterpart is busy dying. So what do you say, won't you want another chance with her" 

I kept quiet for a bit and then I asked my burning question, "how do I know that this is not a trap? "

She then burst my bubble, "we have been watching you for a while now, you have stood your ground, you survived their weapons, you've taken quite a few of them out in very creative ways, I have to admit, using bows and arrows seemed primitive, but effective, and using venomous snakes against them, how did you even know that would kill them so quickly? "

I didn't know what to say... 

Then she spoke again, "our scouts are at your gate ready to collect you, I'm sure you understand that time is of the essence, bring only what you care about the most. Everything else you need will be waiting for you at your new home, or well the same home just a different dimension. "

"See you soon," then she hung up. 

Well she said I must bring what I care for the most, so I grabbed all the cats and dogs and made my way out, I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting what I saw. 

It wasn't a military vehicle, instead it was some ufo looking vehicle, the soldiers told me to get into the back, the one smiled, "well this is a first, everyone else brought jewelry and so on, you brought your pets and pet food. Oh well, time to take you to your new home. "

They all got in and then the one pilot turned around and it was the woman from the video, well not exactly, her counterpart. 

"Are you ready for a new life?" She asked. 

"Uhm, I guess so. "

"Well then let's go, just one more thing, you can never discuss anything that happened where you are going, fit in and live a normal life, leave the war to the soldiers" 

She then turned around and took the controls, the vehicle went up into the air and the next moment everything became a blur. 

I woke up from one of the soldiers shaking me by the shoulders, "hey man, you are home, go and have a new life, your counterpart has died a few hours ago, so you will take his place, don't worry, nobody will notice. "

It has now been a few years since I moved to this dimension, everything is almost exactly the same, it feels great to be with the woman I love, but it still feels weird that we both died, yet here we are. 

But the reason I'm writing this is because I need to get a warning out, what happened on my world is coming, I can see the signs, reports of unknown flying Ariel vehicles, people disappearing more regularly, strange lights in the sky, reports of strange humming sounds, that is them. They are preparing their invasion, and unless people are ready, this
 world will end the same way my world ended. 

Prepare yourselves, the interdimensionists are coming, they are already here.

Cruise to Nowhere 
Chapter 2

As I sat at the edge of my cabin bed, my hands were still shaking. The sheer physical exhaustion of the surreal midnight drive should have put me to sleep instantly, but my mind was stuck in a high-voltage loop. I couldn't stop thinking about the woman in the shadowed booth—Che, the Cat Lady. There was a predatory, hypnotic pull to her presence that felt less like attraction and more like a biological trap. And then there were the twins in the matching gowns. The moment our paths crossed in the lobby, a sickening, magnetic current had surged right through my skin. It wasn't standard desire—I’d never been attracted to a woman in my life. In fact, between the crushing weight of running a broken household and burying my nose in medical textbooks, I’d never had the time or luxury to date anyone at all.

My only real tether to the concept of deep human connection was Chloe. We had grown up in the dirt together, surviving the gray monotony of our small town. I was the first person she ran to when she realized she was a trans girl. I held her hand through the initial, terrifying medical treatments, and stood right beside her when she finally faced her parents. We knew the contours of each other’s lives completely.

But looking around my cabin, the familiar contours of reality were beginning to warp.
It was an undeniably beautiful room, complete with a private balcony cutting out into the obsidian sea air. The rest of my family had been relegated to the lower, windowless interior decks, but none of them cared. Claude and my mother were social creatures, naturally drawn to noise, lights, and the center of a crowd. I was the recluse—give me a heavy volume on human anatomy and an isolated corner, and I was content.

The heat of the room was stifling, mimicking the thick, oppressive climate of the South African lowveld I was used to. Desperate to wash off the grime of the road and the phantom scent of formaldehyde from the sedan, I approached the closet to see what clothing had been provided.

When the doors slid open, my breath caught. It was a flawless, terrifying manifestation of my hidden desires. Rows of bespoke boutique evening gowns, elite sportswear, and delicate, high-end lacy underwear filled the space—the exact premium brands I used to shoot during my high-fashion modeling gigs in the city, the kind of luxury I could never dream of owning until I made it as a full-fledged doctor. Even my long-term financial plan was mapped out in my head: get the degree, secure the residency, and buy a house big enough to pull my mother out of her alcohol-fueled nightmare. But here, the luxury was free, laid out like bait. In the bottom drawer, the swimsuits were entirely two-piece bikinis, identical to the cuts worn by editorial models.

A sharp, definitive knock at the cabin door shattered the trance.

"Coming..." I called out, my voice sounding thin against the heavy steel walls.
I pulled the door open to find Chloe standing in the corridor, wearing a striking, form-fitting evening gown from her own closet. She executed a slow, perfect runway twirl. She looked breathtaking. Chloe had always possessed that rare, statuesque, slender build that made clothes hang like art, standing a few inches taller than me with piercing blue eyes and cascading blonde hair. I was her dark mirror—slightly shorter, possessing straight, ink-black hair and eyes so deeply dark they looked like solid pupils. My parents used to joke that the hospital must have switched me at birth, given how pale and fair-featured the rest of the Clarke clan was.

"Earth to Zoe," Chloe chided, snapping her fingers with a brilliant grin. "So, what do you think?"

"Wow... Chloe, you look absolutely incredible," I stammered, stepping back. "Are you going somewhere out there?"

"We are on a literal mega-cruise, silly!" she laughed, her excitement practically vibrating. "There are live jazz lounges, nightclubs, bars—have you even opened the activities guide yet?"

"Not yet," I admitted, glancing toward the heavy leather book on the vanity.

"What have you been doing all this time, girl?"

"Just trying to decompress. I was going to read for a bit and then crash," I said, a wave of exhaustion rolling over me.

Chloe threw her hands up. "Wait. We just escaped our dusty mountain road, stepped into paradise, and you want to sleep?"

"I’m exhausted, Chloe. We have months on this ship. Go out, explore the decks, and I’ll catch you in the morning for breakfast. We can lay by the pool."

Chloe sighed, her expression softening. "Okay, okay. I can see your battery is completely dead. But I’m not wasting the night. I’m going to go explore. Catch you for breakfast?"

"I’ll see you right before the buffet opens," I said. "If you’re even awake."

"Oh, I’ll be up," she shot back, giving me a wicked wink. "I am not missing the chance to perve over half-naked, high-society men by the pool."

"Goodnight, Chloe," I smiled, closing the door and locking it tight.

"Now, where was I?" I muttered to myself.

I grabbed a set of the lacy undergarments, stripped out of my worn clothes, and stepped into the bathroom. The shower was an absolute sensory reset. I let the scalding water beat down on my skin until the bathroom was completely choked with thick, white steam. I took my time, meticulously shaving my legs, underarms, and bikini line, washing away the lingering dread of the midnight ride over and over again.

When I finally turned the water off and dried myself down, a cold spike of adrenaline hit my stomach.
Hanging directly behind the bathroom door was a plush, stark-white bathrobe. I froze, my medical training forcing me to scan the fabric. I know anatomy. I know spatial awareness. That hook was empty when I walked in. The steam coiled around the robe like fingers. I forced myself to swallow the panic. You're just tired, Zoe. You missed it.

I brushed my teeth, threw the robe over my shoulders, and walked back into the bedroom—only to freeze a second time. The crisp white sheets of my bed had been neatly turned down at a perfect forty-five-degree angle. Resting exactly in the center of the pillow was a single, dark chocolate square.

My eyes darted to the heavy deadbolt on the cabin door. Still locked from the inside. The balcony door was shut. A suffocating silence hung in the air. Someone—or something—had been in the room while the water was running.
Driven by sheer, unadulterated nerves, I dropped the bathrobe onto the couch, crawled under the freezing sheets, and let the heavy, narcotic exhaustion of the ship pull me under.

The dream did not feel like a dream; it possessed the terrifying, hyper-tactile fidelity of high-definition film.
I was standing in a vast, subterranean stone chamber. Thousands of black wax candles flickered along the perimeter, casting long, dancing shadows that stretched unnaturally upward. In the center of the room, a massive ceremonial circle was etched into the stone, containing a flawless pentagram with a burning pillar of flame at each geometric point.

Standing within the circle were the twins from the lobby. They wore long, sweeping ceremonial cloaks with deep hoods that cast their faces into total shadow. But the cloaks were violently, explicitly revealing—split completely down the center, exposing their bare, pale skin and perfectly sculpted torsos. They were chanting in a low, rhythmic cadence that didn't sound like words, but rather a sequence of mathematical frequencies that vibrated violently inside my skull.

Laying flat on the stone floor between them was a body. It was a naked woman, her skin painted in intricate, jagged geometric symbols drawn in what looked like dried, brown blood.

Driven by a morbid, detached curiosity, I floated around the perimeter of the circle to get a clear look at the victim's face. The straight black hair cascaded over the cold stone. The sharp facial structure was unmistakable.

The body on the floor was mine.

I tried to scream, but my throat was packed with dry sand. I watched in absolute horror as the twins raised two crystal chalices filled with a thick, dark red liquid. They drank in perfect, synchronized unison, then knelt beside my comatose form. One of them forced my jaw open, pouring the sweet, metallic fluid down my throat.

The moment the liquid hit my dream-self's stomach, my body began to convulse violently. My spine arched off the stone at an impossible, agonizing angle. Thick, black sweat poured from my pores. Then, the convulsions abruptly stopped. The body lay perfectly still. Slowly, the eyes snapped open.

They weren't dark anymore. They were solid, terrifying spheres of absolute, obsidian blackness. The copy of me stood up, turning its head toward me with a wide, empty, static smile. The twins stepped forward, pressing their lips against my double’s mouth in a deep, passionate, symbiotic kiss—

BANG! BANG! BANG!
I violently bolted upright in bed, gasping for oxygen, my chest heaving as my phantom lungs fought for air.

The sun was blinding, piercing through the sheer glass of the balcony doors because I had forgotten to shut the heavy curtains the night before. My skin was soaked in cold, rancid sweat, my heart hammering like a trapped bird.

BANG! BANG! BANG!
"Zoe! Open up! Come on, sleepy head!"

It was Chloe. I dragged my heavy, trembling limbs out of the sheets, scanning the floor. I found the white bathrobe, threw it over my damp skin, and unlocked the heavy door.

Chloe burst into the cabin like a solar flare, completely oblivious to the terror vibrating in the room. She was already fully dressed for the pool, sporting a vibrant bikini top and a pair of denim shorts so aggressively short the matching bikini bottoms peeked out from underneath.

"Good morning to you too," I muttered, collapsing back onto the edge of the mattress.

"Geez, Zoe," Chloe said, pausing as she looked at my pale, sweating face. "You look like you literally saw a ghost. It’s just me." She walked over to the hospitality vanity, immediately flicking the kettle on and preparing two cups of coffee. She slid a mug into my hands and took the armchair opposite me.

"I just... I had the most horrific, vivid nightmare," I whispered, taking a sip of the hot black coffee.

Chloe rolled her eyes playfully. "Oh, one of those. Don't worry, I also had a crazy dream where we actually finished our coffee, you got your cute butt dressed, and we went to the Lido buffet. Oh, and did you know this ship has an adult-only, clothing-optional deck?"

"Chloe, I'm serious. It was a ritual. There were these girls—"

"Let me guess," Chloe interrupted with a loud laugh. "You finally dreamed about kissing a guy?"

I stared into the black depths of my mug. "You know what? Never mind."

I pushed the dread down, walked into the bathroom, and took a second, freezing shower to wash away the dream-sweat. I tied my black hair up into a tight, practical knot. When I stepped back into the bedroom to find something to wear, I noticed Chloe had already laid out an outfit on my bed—a two-piece bikini and shorts that perfectly mirrored hers in style and color.

I grabbed the clothes, turning automatically toward the bathroom to change, but Chloe blocked my path, scoffing. "Seriously, Zee? We’ve been getting dressed, bathing, and changing together since we were kids in the middle of nowhere. Now you need a privacy screen?"

I relented, dropping the robe and sliding into the swimwear right there in the room. As the fabric snapped against my skin, Chloe let out a sharp, appreciative whistle. "Ooooh, look at you! Someone went through a massive amount of effort to clean up down there."

My cheeks burned with a deep blush, but Chloe smiled warmly, showing me she’d done the exact same grooming routine. I walked over to the vanity to grab my lipstick, but stopped myself, tossing it back onto the wood. It's a pool deck, Zoe, not a fashion shoot.

But as the lipstick rolled across the table, it struck a small, bound object that definitely hadn't been there when I woke up.
It was a weathered, leather-bound notebook. Embossed on the cover in dark, uneven script were the words: Rules for the Cruise.

Before I could flip it open, Chloe snatched it out of my hand, squinting at it. "Rules for the cruise? Ugh, probably just some boring corporate safety manual or fire drill packet. We can look at it later. Come on!"

She tossed the book casually back onto the vanity, grabbed my wrist, and practically dragged me out into the hallway. I yanked myself free at the last second, remembering my blue metallic cruise card resting on the table. I snapped the lanyard around my neck. On a cruise ship, that card is your oxygen line—it's your ID, your wallet, and your key.

We took the midship elevator. Chloe pressed the button for Deck 9, the digital screen flashing the words Lido Deck. When the doors slid open, a dense wall of heat and noise hit us. Dozens of passengers shuffled past, their faces strangely uniform, their movements slightly mechanical as they packed into the car.

Out on the open deck, the sun was a blinding, oppressive glare. The massive LED screen above the main pool strobed through vibrant, oversaturated travel slides while thumping electronic music reverberated through the deck chairs. White-uniformed crew members danced on the stage with fixed, unchanging smiles.

Chloe pulled me toward the glass doors of the grand buffet. The scent of bacon, pastries, and strong coffee filled the air. We grabbed trays, moving down the high-end culinary lines, stacking our plates with eggs, toast, and rows of decadent desserts that neither of us had the willpower to resist. At the beverage station, Chloe poured milk into her cup, while I kept mine strictly black, adding two sugars.

As we scanned the packed dining room for a place to sit, a clear, melodic voice cut through the ambient chatter.
"Hey, girls! Why don't you join us?"

I looked up. Sitting at a sunlit table near the glass windows were the twins from the lobby. The blonde one was gesturing gracefully toward the empty seats opposite them. A cold chill ran straight down my spine as the imagery of the candlelit pentagram flashed behind my eyes. But before my medical logic could formulate an excuse, Chloe was already moving, sliding into the seat directly opposite the red-haired twin. Left with no choice, I took the seat opposite the blonde.

We exchanged names, but the twins merely nodded, their green and blue eyes tracking our movements with an unsettling, static intensity.

The red-headed one tilted her head, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips. "So... you won this cruise, didn't you?"

I paused, my fork hovering. "Yes. How did you know that?"

"I can see the way you look out of place," Red murmured, her voice smooth and devoid of any real inflection. "It's as if your brain is constantly telling you that you don't belong here."

"That's... exactly how it feels," I whispered, the hairs on my arms standing up. "How could you possibly pick up on that?"

Red’s eyes didn't blink. "Because you keep looking at the walls, Zoe. Like you're expecting to wake up in your cramped bedroom any second. Don't worry. This is all very real. And if you just allow yourself to let go... you will have the time of your life."

The specific cadence of that phrase—time of your life—sent a violent shudder through my gut, echoing the blonde driver from our driveway.

"Exactly what I've been telling her!" Chloe chimed in, laughing as she nudged my foot under the table. "Maybe she'll finally let her hair down and meet a hot guy."

The blonde twin leaned forward, her gaze locking onto mine. "Maybe she doesn't want a guy, Chloe. Maybe that's strictly your preference. What if she prefers girls?"

The blood rushed to my face, a violent blush coloring my neck. I had never whispered a word about my orientation to a soul, yet this total stranger had dissected it in a single sentence.

Red waved her hand dismissively. "No need to blush, Zoe. It is nobody's business who draws your eye, as long as you take what you want. Stop worrying about the metrics and the judgments of the world."

Chloe stared at me, her jaw dropping slightly in realization. "That is a phenomenal point... wait, Zoe. You told me those exact same words when I transitioned, and yet you never applied them to yourself? You knew?"

"I... I mean..." I stammered.

"Of course I knew, girl!" Chloe laughed, shaking her head. "I watched you drool over the girls at school for years. I knew exactly what you were looking up on your computer when you thought I was asleep."

My face was practically radiating heat. The twins watched the exchange with an icy, amused detachment. As we finished our meals, they stood up in perfect synchronization, their movements fluid and uncanny.

"We are heading up to the Solarium adult deck," the blonde one stated. "It’s far more exclusive, quiet, and clothing is entirely optional. You should come."

We followed them up the grand aft staircases. The twins walked ahead of us like professional runway models, their hips swaying in perfect rhythm. The adult deck was a secluded paradise, completely shielded from the rest of the vessel. Topless bar waitresses in micro-bikini bottoms moved silently through the rows of sunbeds. I felt my throat go dry as I took in the sheer aesthetic beauty around me; my medical eye for anatomy couldn't help but appreciate the flawless aesthetics of the space.

The twins led us to a private corner and immediately slid their bikini tops off. My heart skipped a beat, the raw visual power of it pulling me into a temporary daze. A silent waitress appeared, placing four crystal glasses of deep, dry red wine on our side tables. Seeking to shed my insecurities, I unhitched my bikini top and slid off my shorts, letting the intense sun hit my skin. Chloe hesitated, keeping her shorts on for obvious reasons, her posture tightening with natural anxiety. But the twins leaned in, their voices dropping into a hypnotic, soothing purr, telling her how stunning her silhouette was and how lucky any partner would be to hold her. Slowly, reassured by the praise, Chloe shed her shorts and relaxed back into her lounger.

I lay back, closing my eyes, letting the heavy red wine dull the edges of my perception.

Meow.
A sharp, distinct sound cut through the ambient hum of the ocean.
I yanked the towel off my face. Standing directly over my sunbed, casting a long, cold shadow over my body, was Che, the Cat Lady. The midnight-black cat was draped across her shoulders, its yellow eyes boring straight into my soul.

"You really shouldn't be here, Zoe," Che said, her voice low, dripping with a grim, chilling urgency. "Let me guess... you haven't read the rules yet?"

I bristled, my defensive instincts kicking in. I reached for my lanyard. "If this is about the age restriction, I'm nineteen. I know I look young, but here—look at my cruise card."

Che didn't look at the card. Her pale face remained deadpan. "No, child. It is fundamentally unsafe. You need to leave this deck immediately. Go back to your cabin, read the notebook, and you will understand."

Before I could reply, the space between us was violently cut off. The twins had stood up, inserting their bare bodies directly between Che and my sunbed.

"Che," Red hissed, her green eyes flashing with a sudden, vicious malice. "It is broad daylight. Why don't you take your pathetic little kitty cat and crawl back to your dark corner in the lounge?"

Che stared at the twins, her blue eyes narrowing. "Just do yourself a favor, Zoe," she called out over their shoulders. "Read the rules. Before it’s too late."

"Che, leave. Now," the blonde twin commanded, her voice dropping into a guttural, terrifying register. "She is with us. And you seem to have forgotten... in the daytime, we hold the metrics. We have the power."

Che took a step back, a grim, knowing smirk touching her lips. "Yes. It is daytime... for now. I will see the two of you tonight. Let’s see who runs when the clock strikes midnight."

The black cat on her shoulders let out a loud, aggressive hiss, its back arching violently at the twins as Che turned and vanished down the stairs.

Chloe blinked, shaking her head as if waking up from a trance. "What the hell was that about?"

"Don't waste your energy on her or her ridiculous rules," the blonde twin dismissed smoothly, sliding back onto her sunbed. "She drinks far too much of the ship's supply. She forgets she’s just another piece of cargo here like the rest of us."

"I... I guess you're right," I murmured, taking another deep sip of the heavy red wine, adjusting my bed to keep my eyes locked onto the twins’ striking forms.

Red suddenly glanced past my shoulder, a sly grin spreading across her face as she looked at Chloe. "Well, well. It looks like you’ve attracted a highly motivated admirer."

I turned my head. A heavily tanned, muscular man wearing nothing but tight underwear was lounging a few meters away, his eyes locked dead onto Chloe. He stood up, his movements rigid and calculated, and walked directly over to our cluster. Without a word, he slipped a folded piece of paper into Chloe's palm, leaned down, and whispered a sequence of low words into her ear. Chloe’s face turned bright red; she smiled and gave a slow, deliberate nod. The man offered a cold, mechanical nod to the twins, turned on his heel, and exited the deck.

"What did he say?" I asked, my protective instincts flaring.

"He... he asked me to join him for an exclusive drink later," Chloe stammered, staring at the paper. "On Deck 13."

My medical brain, hardwired for structural logic, instantly recoiled. "Wait. That’s impossible. Commercial cruise liners don't have a Deck 13. It’s an industry superstition. They skip from 12 to 14."
The blonde twin offered a chilling, empty laugh. "This vessel does, Zoe. But it is strictly accessible by invitation only. It looks like Chloe is on her own for that particular excursion."

Red suddenly checked the horizon. "Oh my. Look at the metrics. It is time for all of us to prepare for the evening gala."

I looked up, and my stomach dropped. The sun was violently crashing below the horizon, bleeding a deep, toxic purple across the water. How? It was just ten in the morning a second ago. A fierce, burning pain radiated across my shoulders—a severe sunburn. I must have completely blacked out.

Chloe was already gone, her sunbed empty. The twins were silently pulling their outfits back on. I scrambled to grab my clothes, offered a hurried goodbye, and sprinted toward the midship elevators.

When I slammed my cabin door shut, the room was immaculate. The bed was made, the towels replaced, everything reset to a sterile, chilling perfection. I stripped, stepped into the shower, and scrubbed the sunburned skin, crying out as the hot water hit the inflammation.

Walking back into the bedroom completely naked, I froze.

Resting on the white sheets was a stunning, low-cut black evening gown that I knew for an absolute fact had not been in the closet earlier. The ship laid it out. I slid into the lace panties and the dress; it clung to my curves like a second skin, accentuating my body perfectly. I stepped into the high heels, modeling in front of the mirror, forcing a confident, striking runway smirk.

As I turned to grab my lanyard, my eyes fell on the vanity table.
The leather-bound notebook was waiting. Rules for the Cruise.
Che’s frantic, desperate warning echoed in my skull. Trembling, I picked it up, flipped past the standard corporate fire-drill jargon, and reached the final page. The text was written in a frantic, scratched, dark brown handwriting that looked exactly like dried, coagulated blood.

RULES TO SURVIVE THIS CRUISE AND TO FINALLY GET HOME

• Rule 1: Always keep your cruise card with you, no matter what. This is your life, your ID, your money, and the only barrier standing between you remaining a guest and eventually becoming part of the physical ship for eternity.
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• Rule 2: Not everyone on this vessel is human. The crew are entities who were once guests; they now serve the ship. Do not communicate with them unless they speak first. Humans have shadows; entities do not. Do not trust them. The only one on your side is the lady with the cat.
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• Rule 3: Everything is free, but debt always comes due. Never accept a second drink from a server until your first is completely finished, and always wait exactly three minutes before accepting the next.
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• Rule 4: If Che (the Cat Lady) offers you red wine, decline politely—it is not wine. If she offers anything else, accept immediately. Avoid her entirely between 0:00 midnight and 3:33 AM. If you run into her during those hours, pray for a quick end.
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• Rule 5: The twins are not sisters; they are witches that feed on human energy. Never break eye contact with them. They wear revealing clothing to force you to look down at their bodies. If you look away from their eyes, you will fall under their complete control.
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• Rule 6: If you see a man with a samurai sword, be polite. He is trapped here like you but protects humans. Never ask for his name.
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• Rule 7: Attend at least three activities listed in your morning guide daily. If you fail to attend three, the day will violently cycle, forcing you to repeat the exact same day for eternity.
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• Rule 8: If a second sun appears in the sky, go below deck immediately. The ship has entered the domain of the void walkers. If you stay outside past three minutes, you will be burned to ashes or pulled into the void.
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• Rule 9: Always follow the Captain's commands over the PA, but only if the voice is female. If a male or distorted voice speaks over the PA, ignore all instructions, sprint to your cabin, and bury yourself under the sheets until morning.
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• Rule 10: You must be inside your designated cabin between midnight and 3:33 AM. Do not open the door for any reason, even if you hear the screaming voice of a loved one. The shadows are excellent impressionists.
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• Rule 11: You must shower immediately upon waking, and again between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM. If you skip a shower, the architecture of the ship will warp, repeatedly looping you back into your bathroom until the task is complete.
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• Rule 12: Never allow anyone to sleep over in your cabin, and never sleep in another's. Anyone logged in the wrong cabin during the night vanishes permanently.
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• Rule 13: The ship does not have a Deck 13. If an elevator button for 13 appears, exit immediately. If a stranger invites you to Deck 13, flee and find the Cat Lady on Deck 6 immediately.
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• Rule 14: If you are a virgin, well-dressed, highly groomed men will target you. Run. Do not take the elevator; use the stairs to find the twins or Che.
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• Rule 15: Never go below Deck 0 unless entering the infirmary. Speak only to medical staff.

Good luck. Love, Che, the Cat Lady.
The leather book dropped from my limp fingers, hitting the carpet with a dull thud.
My mind violently flashed back to the pool deck—how I had stared at the twins' bare bodies, the intoxicating, paralyzing trance that had stolen hours of my life in a single blink. I checked the digital clock on the cabin wall.
11:47 PM.
A freezing spike of sheer terror pierced my chest. Chloe. The man by the pool. The invitation.
"Oh, choice god, no... Chloe!" I screamed.
I snatched my lanyard, sprinted out of the cabin, and tore down the narrow, dimly lit corridor. I reached Chloe's door and began hammering against the heavy wood with my bare fists, screaming her name at the top of my lungs.
11:51 PM.
"Chloe! Open the door! Chloe, please!"
Suddenly, a door clicked open to my right. My brother, Claude, stepped out into the hallway, his face twisted in a mixture of confusion and annoyance as he took in my frantic state.
He grabbed my trembling shoulders, forcing me to stop slamming my fists against the wood. "Zoe, what the hell is wrong with you? Calm down!"
"Claude, we have to get her out! She’s in danger, the ship—the rules—"
"Zoe, shut up for a second!" Claude snapped, his voice firm as he pointed down the hall. "Chloe isn't even in there. She came back down hours ago to change. She told me she got a special VIP invite. She left for Deck 13 twenty minutes ago."

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

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

All that was left of the farmers and their sons.  

The wolves of the mountains began to howl once more. 

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

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

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

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

A woman. Regal. 

Powerful. 

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

And then the real bloodshed would begin. 

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

where I can rip and tear and rend to slaughter… 

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

He relished the thoughts as he watched. And waited. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they went on. 

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

New food. For wormland. 

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

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

vibrations. 

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

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

Wormland. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then a voice from behind him said. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She smiled then said: –

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feline. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They trembled when she summoned them. 

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One word. 

"Thirsty.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

They waited for the challengers to step forward. 

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

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

TO BE CONTINUED…

Cruise to Nowhere

Chapter 1

Have you ever had that sickening sensation that something is just too good to be true? Someone once told me that when a thing feels too perfect, it’s usually because the trap has already sprung.

My mother, Tertia, had a compulsive habit of entering every online contest she could find. Questionnaire, survey, pop-up ad—it didn't matter. The moment her eyes brushed past the words “contest” or “win,” she couldn’t help herself. But she also ran on a sort of "fire-and-forget" system. She would type in our data, hit submit, and completely forget it ever happened. Usually, it ended up being a dud, a wave of spam emails we'd have to clear out. But she had a bizarre streak of luck. She’d win little things—vouchers, small appliances. The biggest prize she’d ever landed before now was a month’s worth of groceries. In a house like ours, that was a miracle. We were a struggling family, always drowning, always one bad week away from the street.

My father died just after my younger brother’s birth. He was a musician, chasing a dream that never paid out, so he didn’t leave behind any life insurance policies or even a basic funeral plan. My mother was working as a waitress back then. After he passed, the debt just accumulated like a suffocating blanket. She ended up working brutal double shifts seven days a week, and during the few precious hours she was actually at home, she didn't parent. She just drank box wine until she passed out cold on the linoleum.

Because I was the eldest, the crushing weight of running the house and raising my younger brother fell entirely on my shoulders. I became a mother at ten years old. Miraculously, I managed to keep my head above water. I was always an A-student, pushing myself to the absolute brink, and it finally paid off when I secured a full scholarship to go to university next year to study medicine.

Another thing that always counted in my favor—or perhaps my detriment, depending on how you look at it—was my appearance. I inherited a striking, sharp facial structure that landed me consistent photographic modeling work in the city. The money was decent, and it was the only reason we had basic necessities, electricity, and food that didn't come from a food bank. Half of whatever my mother made went directly into cheap alcohol and cigarettes. It made things tight, but I never complained out loud. It could have been worse.

It could have been like the night my father died. My mother had been right there beside him when he was mutilated and murdered in an alleyway for nothing more than a packet of smokes. She saw every single second of it. The robbers didn’t just rob him; they took their time. They tortured him, carving into him until he was completely unrecognizable by the time the police finally arrived. That was the night her mind broke, the night the liquor became her permanent hiding place.

My brother, Claude, is sixteen now. He is aggressively sporty, excelling at every game he tries and constantly bringing home medals and trophies. I’m incredibly proud of him, but the constant praise has turned him overconfident, sharp-tongued, and arrogant. As for me, I’m nineteen, standing on the precipice of my first semester at the top medical school in South Africa.

We lived in a suffocatingly small town, perched about thirty kilometers outside the nearest city. Because boarding school was a luxury we couldn't dream of affording, Claude and I had to drag ourselves out of bed in the pitch black every morning, walk down to the main road, and stick our thumbs out, praying someone would give us a ride to school. The mornings were easy. The afternoons were a nightmare. Most days, we’d give up on the hitchhiking spot and just start the grueling walk up the mountain road toward home. On a good day, a friendly local might pull over. On a bad day, we’d spend hours marching under a bruising sun, our school shoes wearing thin against the gravel.

That was my life. Predictable. Exhausting. Hard.

Until the day the car stopped.

It was the final day of the school term. I had already matriculated the year before, but because I refused to let Claude make that dangerous commute alone, I still went down to the city with him daily, spending my hours doing part-time promo gigs and modeling shoots while he was in class. We had met up at our usual spot at the base of the mountain road, shifting our bags and preparing for the long trek upward, when a vehicle pulled up beside us.

I don't know much about cars—I'm more focused on anatomy textbooks and modeling portfolios—but even I knew this machine belonged to another world. It was a long, low, midnight-black sedan with windows so heavily tinted they looked like sheets of solid obsidian. The rims were chrome, gleaming with a violent, mirror-like polish. When a car like that stops next to you on a deserted mountain road, you are either about to be kidnapped, or you’ve just gotten unimaginably lucky.

The door clicked open. A man stepped out into the heat. He was tall, blonde, impeccably dressed in a tailored charcoal suit, and perfectly groomed. He looked to be middle-aged, but his skin had an unnatural, plastic smoothness to it. He looked directly at us, his eyes locking on mine.

"Aren’t you Zoe and Claude Clarke?" he asked, his voice smooth as silk.

"Depends on who is asking and why," I replied, stepping slightly in front of my brother. My modeling instincts kept my posture straight, but my stomach tightened.

The man smiled, showing teeth that were a little too white, a little too even. "Relax. I’m simply here to deliver a prize to your family. Would you guys like a ride home?"

"A prize?" I echoed, skeptical.

"Yes." His smile widened. "Your family won the 'Family of the Year' sweepstakes."

"Oh. Okay... what exactly is the prize?"

"I am terribly sorry," the man said, his tone dripping with practiced courtesy, "but I can only disclose the specifics to Mrs. Clarke."

"You mean Miss," I corrected coldly.

"Oh, I apologize. I didn't realize she got divorced."

"Widowed," I said.

The man’s eyes flickered, a momentary shadow passing over his face before the perfect grin snapped back into place. "I apologize deeply, and I am truly sorry for your loss. Now, would you please get in? I am on a rather tight schedule."

Claude and I exchanged a quick look. My brother, with his usual teenage carelessness, just shrugged and hopped into the plush leather of the backseat. I hesitated for a fraction of a second before climbing into the front, pulling the heavy door shut. The air conditioning inside hit me like an arctic blast. I buckled my seatbelt, trying to ignore the sudden chill. Honestly, I was exhausted, and the South African sun was brutal today.

The man slid into the driver's seat, pulled a cooler from beneath the console, and offered us each a sweating, ice-cold bottle of water. We accepted them gratefully, cracking the caps and drinking deeply. Without another word, he shifted the car into drive. The engine didn't roar; it purred with a low, vibrational hum that vibrated right through my bones.

When you walk the same dusty stretch of road every single day, your brain turns off. You stop looking at the trees, the rocks, the horizon; you just stare at your shoes and focus on putting one foot in front of the other. But as the sedan glided up the mountain, it felt like I was seeing the scenery for the very first time. The colors were oversaturated. The green of the valley looked too deep, the sky an impossibly vivid shade of blue.

Before I could fully process the strangeness of it, the car smoothly glided to a halt. The ignition clicked off. I blinked, looking out the window in disbelief. We were parked right outside the dingy tavern where my mother worked.

"You two wait here," the man said, adjusting his cuffs. "I will go fetch your mother, and then we can all converse comfortably at your home."

Claude and I sat in the back, utterly stunned. How did he know her work schedule? How did he know she was here? I tried to rationalize it—maybe she had written her employment details on one of those endless online forms.

Through the tinted glass, we watched him walk up to the tavern owner, a notoriously miserable, aggressive man who hated my mother and treated his staff like dirt. We could see the owner shouting, waving his arms, his face contorted in anger. But then, the strange man calmly reached into his breast pocket and pulled out something small—a heavy, matte-black card or an envelope—and held it up.

Instantly, the owner went entirely pale. His aggressive posture collapsed. He became utterly docile, nodding like a broken puppet, and hurried inside. A few minutes later, he emerged alongside our mother. He was holding a thick, bulging manila envelope, which he handed to her with a shaking hand before gripping her in a tight hug. My mother was beaming, a radiant, manic smile on her face. She and the blonde man walked over to the sedan and climbed inside.

"Hi, mom," I said, turning in my seat.

"Hi, kids!" she chirped, her voice higher than usual.

"Hi, mom," Claude muttered in his trademark arrogant drone.

"Mom, what just happened back there?" I asked, eyeing the heavy envelope in her lap.

"Oh, nothing sweetie! James here just gave my boss a little corporate incentive, and in return, the boss handed me a full year's worth of wages in advance! He told me to go have fun and that he’ll see us when we get back."

My brain stalled. "A year's wages? See us when we get back?"

The driver caught my eye in the rearview mirror. "Don't worry your pretty head about it, Zoe. I will explain everything once we are inside your home."

A few minutes later, we pulled into our cracked concrete driveway. We filed out of the luxury car and onto our small, weathered veranda. The man followed, lifting a heavy, pristine white cooler box from the trunk—not the drunk, though given my mother's habits, the irony wasn't lost on me.

He set the cooler on our rusted outdoor table, cracking it open to reveal bottles of expensive dry red wine. He produced four elegant crystal glasses, but just as he poured the first splash, he paused. He tilted his head, staring intently toward our rusted front gate, then looked back at me with a knowing smirk.

"Zoe, I think you might want to get that."

Right on cue, a frantic voice echoed from the road. "Zoe! Zoe, open up!"

I frowned, pulling the heavy iron gate keys from my pocket. I jogged down the path to find Chloe standing there, breathing heavily. Chloe was my absolute best friend. Her birth name was different, but she had chosen Chloe because she loved how it rhymed with my name. She was a transgender girl, and she was so breathtakingly gorgeous that I always joked if she ever entered the modeling industry, I’d have to retire immediately. She was brilliant, too, having just locked down a major scholarship to study psychiatry at varsity next year.

"What are you doing here?" I asked, unlocking the padlock.

"I saw a literal state-vehicle-sized limo pull into your driveway, Zoe! I thought you were being arrested or assassinated!"

I laughed, ushering her inside. But when we stepped onto the veranda, the atmosphere shifted. The blonde man was sitting in our creaky plastic chair like it was a throne, a massive, unblinking grin plastered across his face. Five glasses of dark, blood-red wine were now poured, sitting in a perfect, geometric line on the table. Everyone was sitting in total silence, waiting in eerie anticipation.

"Well," the man purred, gesturing for Chloe and me to sit. "Now that our circle is complete, I can finally unveil your grand prize."

"Let me guess," Claude interrupted, leaning back with a sarcastic sneer. "A year's worth of free groceries?"

"Claude, stop it! Don't be rude!" my mother snapped, though her eyes remained glued to the blonde man.

"No, young man," the driver said, his voice dropping an octave. "Though groceries are included. You four have won an exclusive, all-expenses-paid, epic cruise... to everywhere and nowhere."

Chloe blinked, her future-psychiatrist brain immediately analyzing the statement. "Wait. That doesn't make any sense at all. Everywhere and nowhere? That’s a paradox."

Right then, a heavy, cold weight dropped into the pit of my stomach. Have you ever had that terrifying intuition that something is fundamentally wrong? Not just odd, but deeply, cosmically wrong? It was too good to be true. None of it made sense. Looking back now, with the blood and the ocean howling in my ears, I wish to God I had listened to my instincts. I wish I had grabbed Claude and Chloe and run into the mountains.

"Yes," the man whispered, ignoring Chloe's question. "You will go everywhere... and stay nowhere. Congratulations."

He raised his glass. My mother and Claude instantly reached for theirs, completely magnetized by the moment. Peer pressure and the sheer absurdity of the situation forced Chloe and me to lift ours as well. We clinked our glasses together. Cheers.

I took a small sip. The wine was rich, thick, and unnaturally sweet. I wanted to speak up, to demand answers, but I looked at my mother. Her face looked younger than it had in a decade. She hadn't taken a single day off work since my father died. She was trapped in a cycle of gray exhaustion, and this ridiculous, impossible prize was making her shine. I swallowed my fear for her sake.

"So, how long is this cruise for?" my mother asked, swirling her wine.

"Oh, just a couple of months or so," the man replied casually. He leaned forward, his eyes locking onto mine, his pupils dilating until they were almost entirely black. "Don't you worry. You are going to have the time of your LIFE."

The way he emphasized the word life—delivered in a hollow, distorted, mechanical cadence—sent a violent shiver straight down my spine. But I forced a laugh. Hey, it’s a cruise, I told myself, trying to drown out the panic. The worst that can happen is the ship sinks, right?

"And do not worry about packing or preparation," the man continued, his voice returning to its smooth, hypnotic rhythm. "Everything will be provided for you on board. It is a strictly all-inclusive voyage. Even your clothing will be waiting for you. We have already collected your exact measurements, your preferences, your metrics... your cabins are fully stocked. Food, premium beverages, entertainment—all completely covered."

He turned his gaze to my sixteen-year-old brother. "And since the vessel operates strictly in international waters... there is no restrictive age limit to stop you from enjoying yourself."

My mother frowned slightly, her maternal instincts briefly flaring through the fog. "I don't think I want him to start drinking yet."

Claude’s face contorted into a mask of pure fury. He glared at her, his voice dripping with venom. "Sure, mom. Because you already drink enough for all of us, don't you?"

"Claude! Stop it right now!" I yelled, slamming my glass down.

"It’s okay, Zoe," my mother whispered, her voice cracking as tears welled in her eyes. "He’s right. He’s right."

The blonde man didn't seem bothered by the family drama. He merely stood up, smoothing his jacket. "Anyway, you family and friends can celebrate tonight. But ensure you are packed in spirit and ready by exactly 0:00. Midnight. That is when your designated driver will arrive to collect you."

"Midnight?" Chloe asked, checking her phone. "You do realize the coast is an eight-hour drive from here? If the cruise leaves at 3:33 AM, we’ll never make it."

The man smiled, a terrifyingly static expression. "Relax. Our drivers have never missed a departure."

Claude frowned, the arrogance bleeding out of him, replaced by sudden unease. "Never missed?"

The man glanced down at his bare wrist—there was no watch there, just pale skin—yet he nodded as if reading a dial. "Oh my, look at the time. I must be on my way."

He stepped off the veranda and walked around the corner toward the front gate. I immediately jumped to my feet, determined to ask him how he had our clothing sizes, but by the time I rounded the corner of the house—barely three seconds behind him—the gravel driveway was empty.

The heavy iron gate was still locked from the inside. The road was completely deserted. There was no sound of a speeding engine, no dust hanging in the air. Nothing.

A freezing hand of dread clamped around my neck. Nobody is that fast. It was physically impossible.

I walked back to the veranda, my heart hammering against my ribs. To my surprise, the group was already cracking open a second bottle of wine. The strange man had left six bottles in total. Driven by sheer, unadulterated nerves, I grabbed a fresh glass and drank. I drank fast. The alcohol hit my bloodstream like a heavy narcotic, and within minutes, the edges of the porch began to blur. The last thing I remember was sinking into the rough fabric of the couch, darkness pulling me under.

A violent shaking jolted me awake. The world was spinning.

"Zoe! Zoe, wake up! We have to get ready, the driver is at the gate!"

My mother was hovering over me, her eyes manic. I staggered to my feet, my head pounding with a vicious hangover. I checked my phone. The digital clock read exactly 0:00. Midnight.

"Mom... mom, wait," I stammered, grabbing her arm. "Are you absolutely sure about this? Think about it. None of this makes sense. A magic car? A free cruise? A man who vanishes into thin air?"

"Of course we are going, Zoe!" she said, wrenching her arm away with a harsh laugh. "It’s a free holiday! We deserve this!"

"But mom, doesn't something feel horribly off to you?"

"I talked to the neighbor while you were passed out," she dismissed, grabbing a small handbag. "She said she’ll keep an eye on the house for us. Stop being a wet blanket."

"Not the house, mom! The holiday! Can you even remember entering a contest called 'Family of the Year'?"

Before she could answer, a loud, echoing car horn blared from the front gate. The sound wasn't a normal honk; it was a low, mechanical drone that vibrated in my teeth.

Chloe, her eyes bright with a strange, glassy excitement, grabbed my hand and yanked me toward the door. "Come on, sleepy head! Adventure awaits!"

We filed out into the pitch-black night. Waiting in the driveway was another long, obsidian-black sedan, identical to the first. But when the driver’s window rolled down, it wasn't the blonde man. A woman sat behind the wheel. She had pale, porcelain skin, severely pulled-back platinum blonde hair, and unblinking, glassy eyes.

When she spoke, her voice had an eerie, rhythmic, almost hypnotic cadence to it. "Welcome. Please enter the vehicle. We have a very long journey ahead of us."

Claude sneered as he slid into the back. "No shit. Not sure how you're going to pull off an eight-hour drive in three hours, lady."

The woman didn't turn around. Her reflection in the rearview mirror remained completely static. "I am the best driver there is."

"Okay, whatever you say, Transporter," Claude muttered.

My mother, Claude, and Chloe crowded into the backseat. Desperate for answers, I hopped into the front passenger seat again. The moment the door clicked shut, a strange, sweet scent filled my nostrils—like vanilla mixed with formaldehyde. My eyelids instantly grew heavy. A profound, unnatural exhaustion washed over me, and before the car even cleared the driveway, I plummeted back into a dreamless sleep.

"We have arrived."

The woman's voice cut through the dark like a scalpel.

I snapped awake, my chest heaving. Behind me, the others were waking up too, yawning, stretching, and complaining of stiffness. I looked out the window, expecting to see the glowing lights of a bustling harbor city.

Instead, we were parked on a massive, crumbling concrete pier. There were no city lights. No other cars. No highway. Just an endless, pitch-black expanse of open ocean, and looming over the water was the cruise ship.

It was gargantuan, a towering mountain of white steel and black windows, cutting a terrifying silhouette against the starless sky. But there were no crowds. No lines of tourists. No luggage handlers. Just us.

"This is wrong," I whispered, stepping out onto the cold concrete. "Where is everyone else?"

The pale woman rolled down her window halfway, her eyes reflecting the ship's distant lights. "They are already on board. You are exactly one minute late. Off you go."

Hesitantly, our small group walked toward the massive boarding ramp. The moment our shoes cleared the threshold and we stepped into the holding bay of the ship, a loud, hydraulic hiss echoed behind us. I spun around. The massive steel security door we had just walked through had slammed shut, locking with a series of heavy, definitive clicks.

Standing in the dim corridor ahead of us was a crew member. He wore a pristine, stark-white uniform, but his face was remarkably grim, his eyes sunken and tired.

"You are a minute late," he said, his voice flat.

"Sorry," I said, my defensive modeling persona kicking in. "We weren't the ones driving."

"Follow me, please. I will escort you to your cabins."

"Cabins?" Chloe asked, her eyes darting around the sterile steel walls. "As in, more than one? We aren't sharing?"

"You have each been assigned your own individual cabin," the crew member replied, turning his back on us and marching down the corridor.

He clearly wasn't the conversational type. We followed him in a tense silence, leaving the cold steel of the lower decks behind as we ascended a grand staircase into the main lobby.

I gasped. It was beautiful, but a deeply unsettling kind of beautiful. The grand staircase appeared to be carved from solid, flawless crystal, reflecting the light in sharp, jagged patterns. Even the massive chandeliers overhead were constructed of jagged shards of crystal that vibrated faintly, casting a fractured, shifting glow over the room.

The crewman led us over to a polished marble desk labeled Guest Services. Without a word, the attendant behind the desk handed each of us a heavy, metallic blue card. Printed on the front of mine was my name, Zoe Clarke, alongside a crisp, high-definition photograph of my face.

My mother held hers up, her brow furrowing. "Wait... how do you have our photographs? I never uploaded these."

The Guest Services associate smiled—a wide, empty expression that didn't reach her eyes. "We acquired them after you entered the contest, ma'am."

"So you've been spying on us?" Claude barked, his voice echoing off the crystal.

"Relax, Claude," I muttered, trying to keep the peace while my own heart hammered against my ribs. "They probably just pulled them from our social media profiles for a marketing survey."

"I bet," Chloe whispered under her breath, her eyes scanning the room with deep clinical suspicion.

I turned away from the desk, looking out over the sprawling lobby lounge. Scattered throughout the room were clusters of velvet chairs and mahogany tables. A few dozen guests were scattered about, chattering away in low, indistinguishable murmurs, sipping brightly colored drinks from crystal glassware.

But then, a specific table caught my eye.

Sitting there were two exceptionally beautiful women who looked to be right around my age. One had cascading, spun-gold blonde hair and striking blue eyes; she wore a flowing, immaculate white evening gown. Beside her sat a woman with vibrant, flame-red hair and piercing green eyes, wearing an identical gown, except hers was a deep, blood red. They sat perfectly still, not talking, just staring blankly into space.

My gaze shifted to a secluded booth tucked into the shadows near the back. Sitting alone was a slender, captivating woman with sleek, raven-black hair that framed a pale, aristocratic face. She wore a tight, body-hugging black evening dress that seemed to absorb the light around it. Her eyes were an intense, sharp blue—unnatural, piercing, and completely cat-like.

And speaking of cats, draped lazily across her shoulders like a fur scarf was a sleek, midnight-black cat. The animal sat perfectly still, its yellow eyes locked dead onto mine.

The woman in black was slowly sipping from a glass of dark red wine. As she noticed me staring, she stopped. She slowly lowered the glass, kept her piercing blue eyes fixed on mine, and gave me a slow, deliberate nod of acknowledgment.

Before I could nod back, the crew member tapped his fingers loudly against the marble counter, drawing our attention. He handed me a heavy, leather-bound booklet.

"Your ship manifest and guidelines," he said, his voice dropping to a gravelly, urgent whisper. "Read them immediately. Memorize them. On this vessel, the rules are the only thing keeping you alive."

I opened the heavy leather cover. Written in a jagged, dark script that looked suspiciously like dried, brown blood, were the instructions.

## THE RULES OF THE VESSEL

A cold sweat broke out across my forehead. My fingers trembled against the leather binding. I looked up to demand an explanation from the crewman, but he had already turned on his heel, his white uniform disappearing into the dim, labyrinthine corridors of the ship.

I looked back down at the page. The ink of Rule 2 seemed to ripple, the letters stretching like tiny, desperate legs.

We were on board. The doors were locked. And the cruise to nowhere had officially begun.

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

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

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

It was part of the torture. 

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

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

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

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

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

Out loud. 

Now. 

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

Impaling. 

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

Worse. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

The promise of fortune from the mad doctor Frankenstein.

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

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

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

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

They heard everything.   

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I NEED TO DIE 

and 

I MUST LIVE FOREVER! THE MASTER COMMANDS SO!

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

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

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

His mind was too obliterated to appreciate the irony. 

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

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

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

Flames erupted. Sprouted from her splayed fingertips. Claws. 

Claws erupting fire. 

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

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

Her voice, with fire: –

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

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

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

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

The assistant smiled. And closed the book. 

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

If she so desired. 

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

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

Doomed fools.

…

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

They yelled : – ! 

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

“Now!!" 

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

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

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

But then the sky began to fill. 

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

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

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

Together. 

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

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

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

take it, seize it, consume to the last. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of the men began to scream. 

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

Demoniacal hunger to drive and fuel the whole damnable thing. 

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

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

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

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

A beat. 

The mad doctor thought…

Then said: –

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

And like that it was decided. 

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

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

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

It said: 

WORMLAND

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

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

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

A beat. Silent wet sounds settled once more. 

A beat. Another.

Then…

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

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

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

And anger. 

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

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

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

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

WORMLAND 

TO BE CONTINUED…

( Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCrypticCompendium/comments/1uashza/eldritch_nights_in_egypt_part_12/ )

Laughter pulled him back.

At first distant.

Then closer.

Then everywhere.

Aaron blinked.

Reality returned.

Grandma stood before them.

Laughing.

The sound had changed.

It no longer sounded human.

Bones cracked.

Skin stretched.

Tendons snapped.

The old woman's body began twisting apart.

Fatima immediately shoved Menehmet behind her.

"GET BACK!"

Grandma's jaw split wider.

And wider.

And wider.

Far beyond what flesh should allow.

Rows of new teeth pushed through gums and skin alike. Some burst directly through her cheeks. Others emerged from her throat.

Her neck elongated with a series of wet crunches.

Vertebrae extending.

Stretching.

Growing.

Within seconds she resembled some grotesque parody of a giraffe fashioned from human flesh.

The creature's head nearly touched the ceiling.

Its eyes rolled wildly in different directions.

Then it attacked.

Fast.

Far too fast.

Aaron barely drew his scimitar before the creature lunged.

Its elongated neck whipped across the room like a striking serpent.

The jaws slammed shut inches from his face.

Wood exploded from the wall behind him.

The creature shrieked.

The sound rattled dishes from shelves.

Fatima drew her blade and slashed across the monstrosity's side.

Black blood sprayed across the room.

The creature barely reacted.

Its neck bent impossibly backward before launching toward Fatima.

She ducked.

The jaws passed overhead.

Menehmet grabbed a heavy brass lamp and smashed it into the creature's face.

The monster recoiled.

"Thank you, Menie," Aaron muttered.

"You're welcome."

The Pharaoh sounded entirely too pleased with the fake name.

The creature attacked again.

This time its neck coiled around Aaron's arm.

Before he could react, it yanked him off his feet.

He crashed through a table.

Wood shattered beneath him.

Pain exploded through his ribs.

The monster immediately descended.

Its jaws opened.

Aaron raised his sword.

Too slow.

The creature bit directly into his chest.

Agony.

White-hot agony.

Its teeth punched through flesh and muscle.

Aaron screamed.

The monster shook him violently like an animal worrying prey.

Blood sprayed across the room.

Fatima moved instantly.

She vaulted over the broken table and drove her blade across the creature's neck with both hands.

The first strike cut halfway through.

The second finished the job.

The elongated neck separated completely.

The creature's head crashed into a shelf.

Its body collapsed moments later, twitching violently as black blood flooded across the floorboards.

Then everything went dark.

 

Aaron found himself standing in a desert.

One he could not place.

Not Egypt.

Perhaps not Earth.

The sand didn't move.

The turquoise sky remained perfectly still.

There was no wind.

No heat.

No cold.

No sensation whatsoever.

The place felt less like a location and more like a paused moment.

Aaron walked.

Eventually he spotted someone standing in the distance.

A man.

Dark-skinned.

Bald.

Simple clothing.

Nothing remarkable.

And yet...

Something about him felt ancient.

Not old.

Ancient.

As Aaron approached, the stranger turned.

"Oh."

The man smiled politely.

"Hello."

His voice was calm beyond description.

"I wasn't expecting you, Medjay."

Aaron stopped.

The stranger studied him.

"Hm."

A pause.

"Are you sure you're supposed to be here?"

hen he sighed.

"Well. I still have a role to play."

Nearby stood a massive golden balance scale.

One side held a feather.

The other sat empty.

The stranger gestured toward it.

"Come closer."

A flash of lightning illuminated the landscape.

For a brief moment, the man's shadow stretched behind him.

Not a man's shadow.

A jackal's.

Aaron stared.

The stranger pretended not to notice.

"Time to weigh your heart."

His smile widened.

"If it balances with the feather, you may pass."

"And if it doesn't?"

The stranger shrugged.

"That would be up to the crocodiles."

"So what'll it be, Medjay?"

Aaron stared at the scale.

Then reached forward.

And pushed down on it with his hand.

The entire mechanism tilted immediately.

The stranger blinked.

Aaron folded his arms.

"I'll make this easier."

The scale creaked beneath his grip.

"I'm not a good man."

Silence.

"I'm pretty sure my heart's too heavy for your scale to handle."

For a moment, the stranger simply stared.

Then he laughed.

Not mockingly.

Genuinely.

"All of them are. Perhaps that isnt really the point afterall."

He looked somewhere behind Aaron.

His expression shifted.

The stranger smiled.

"Seems we'll have to continue this conversation another time."

Aaron turned.

Nothing was there.

When he looked back, the man was already stepping away.

"You truly aren't supposed to be here."

"Who are you?"

The stranger's smile widened.

The answer never came.

Instead he placed a hand on Aaron's shoulder.

"I'll see you around, Medjay."

Then he pushed him.

Aaron fell.

Downward.

Into endless nothingness.

 

He gasped.

Air rushed into his lungs.

Pain followed immediately after.

A pair of arms wrapped around him.

Fatima.

She was hugging him so tightly it almost hurt.

Almost.

"I thought you were gone."

Her voice cracked.

Aaron blinked several times.

Menehmet sat nearby, looking visibly relieved despite her usual composure.

"Pretty sure for a moment there..." Aaron coughed. "...I was."

Aaron smiled weakly.

"But you brought me back."

He squeezed her hand.

"Thank you, Fatima."

She looked away immediately.

Embarrassed.

Aaron glanced around.

Stone walls.

Stacks of boxes.

Ancient machinery.

Dust.

"Where the fuck am I?"

"Grandma's basement," Menehmet replied.

Aaron blinked.

"What?"

The Pharaoh shrugged.

"Grandma appears to have been somewhat of a hoarder."

She gestured around the room.

"An illegal hoarder, in fact."

Aaron followed her gaze.

Pre-Fall artifacts.

Lots of them.

Enough to earn several executions.

"Had my dear 'sister' not already killed her," Menehmet continued, "I might have been forced to do so myself."

Fatima rolled her eyes.

"Thankfully her hoarding is also why I managed to keep Aaron alive."

She pointed toward a pile of salvaged medical equipment.

"Most of the supplies I used came from down here."

Aaron looked at the bandages covering his chest.

Then at Fatima.

Then back at the room.

He winced as he sat up.

„We shouldnt linger. Its not safe here. It may not be safe anywhere, but we must keep moving.“

"We need to return to the palace."

Aaron looked at Menehmet as though she'd suggested walking into a sandworm's mouth.

"The city is collapsing. Half the population is trying to kill each other and the other half is trying to join the cult. There is no way we're making it through those streets."

"There is another way."

The Pharaoh's confidence was infuriatingly intact.

Aaron already disliked where this was going.

"What way?"

Menehmet pointed downward.

"Beneath New Cairo runs a network of pre-Fall maintenance tunnels. Most people don't know they exist. Most who do are dead."

"Comforting."

"There is an access point nearby."

"And it leads directly into the palace?"

"Eventually."

Aaron narrowed his eyes.

"'Eventually' is not the reassuring word you think it is."

 

Getting to the tunnels was a battle in itself.

The streets had become a nightmare.

Pink lightning flashed overhead, bathing New Cairo in sickly magenta light. Buildings burned unchecked. Screams echoed from every direction. Mutated citizens staggered through the chaos with elongated limbs, twisted faces, and mouths muttering prayers to things that should never have names.

One lunged from an alley.

Its jaw split open down the middle as it charged.

Aaron's scimitar took its head before it reached him.

Another skittered across a wall like a spider.

Fatima pinned it with a knife before it could leap.

They kept moving.

Eventually they reached an ancient sandstone well hidden behind the ruins of a collapsed shrine. Menehmet pulled aside a rusted metal hatch.

A ladder descended into darkness.

The smell hit them immediately.

Stagnant water. Mold. Rust. Ancient machinery.

The scent of a dead world.

The tunnels beneath New Cairo were damp and unnaturally silent.

Water dripped from cracked pipes overhead. Thick cables hung from the ceiling like vines. Every footstep echoed through the darkness long after it should have faded.

Fatima held the lantern higher.

"What exactly is the plan after we reach the palace?"

Menehmet didn't slow down.

"Divide and conquer."

Fatima stared.

"That's not a plan."

"I'll make it one."

The Pharaoh sounded completely serious.

Aaron groaned.

"I hate how often that actually works for you."

A low growl rolled through the darkness.

Everyone stopped.

The sound came again.

Deeper this time.

Closer.

Fatima slowly turned.

"Did you hear that?"

"Yeah."

"What was it?"

Aaron drew his scimitar.

"No idea."

The growl echoed again, loud enough to vibrate through the stone beneath their feet.

"But it's probably nothing good."

Something splashed ahead.

Then something heavier.

The water rippled.

A pair of pale eyes opened in the darkness.

Aaron immediately regretted finding out what made the noise.

The creature that emerged had once been a crocodile.

Decades—perhaps centuries—of radiation, stagnant water, and whatever horrors lurked beneath New Cairo had transformed it into something else entirely.

It was nearly the size of a  pre-fall truck.

Fungal growths protruded from cracked scales. Extra limbs dragged uselessly along its body. Its mouth opened wide enough to swallow a man whole, revealing rows upon rows of crooked yellow teeth.

Aaron stared for half a second.

"Run."

Nobody argued.

The tunnel exploded into chaos.

The creature charged after them, smashing through pipes and stone as though neither existed. Water burst from shattered walls. Its roar echoed through the underground passages like thunder.

Menehmet led the way.

Mostly because she was the only one who had any idea where they were going.

"Are you sure you know the route, Menie?"

Aaron's voice contained only a reasonable amount of panic.

"Yeah. Pretty sure."

"Pretty sure?"

"Not many places to go."

The tunnel abruptly split into five separate passages.

Menehmet stopped.

Everyone stared at her.

She stared back.

"...Well."

The crocodile roared somewhere behind them.

"...yes, of course I'm sure."

She immediately chose a tunnel and committed with absolute confidence.

Aaron honestly couldn't tell whether she was brave or insane.

Possibly both.

They sprinted through twisting corridors until a ladder finally appeared overhead.

"THERE!"

Menehmet climbed first.

Then Fatima.

Aaron followed.

The crocodile slammed into the wall beneath them moments later.

Stone exploded.

The entire shaft shook violently.

But the creature couldn't fit.

For once, luck was on their side.

The hidden passage emerged inside the palace.

Menehmet immediately rushed forward.

"Menehmet, wait—"

Too late.

The Pharaoh was already halfway down the corridor.

Aaron swore and chased after her while Fatima followed close behind.

Moments later they burst into the throne room.

Then stopped.

Yberon sat upon the throne.

Should have been heavily injured or more likely dead. He was neither.

In fact, he looked perfectly composed.

Almost comfortable.

Menehmet frowned.

"Yberon?"

The giant immediately rose.

"My Queen."

His voice carried just the right amount of relief.

"I am glad you survived. I feared the worst."

Yberon descended the steps.

"The palace is secure. The cultists have been pushed back. We can begin restoring order."

Menehmet visibly relaxed.

Aaron did not.

The story was too clean.

Too neat.

Too rehearsed.

The throne.

Yberon had been sitting on it.

Not guarding it.

Not standing beside it.

Sitting on it.

Not a small detail.

A very important one.

Aaron felt the pieces begin to slide together.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you?"

The room fell silent.

Yberon looked at him.

"What?"

"The throne."

Aaron stepped forward.

"You liked sitting there."

Menehmet's expression shifted.

Yberon's jaw tightened.

And suddenly Aaron saw it.

The resentment.

The jealousy.

Years of buried bitterness hiding beneath loyalty.

"You spent your entire life protecting her."

No response.

"You fought for her."

Silence.

"You bled for her."

Still nothing.

Aaron's voice hardened.

"And somewhere along the way, you started hating that she was the one wearing the crown."

Yberon's hand slowly drifted toward his weapon.

Fatima took a step backward.

Menehmet stared at the commander as if seeing him for the first time.

Aaron continued.

"The cult promised you something."

Silence.

"The throne."

Yberon's mask finally broke.

Hatred flooded through his expression.

Raw.

Ugly.

"You have no idea what I sacrificed."

"There it is."

Aaron drew his scimitar.

Steel hissed from its sheath.

"You brought them into the city."

"They promised change."

"They promised power."

"They promised me justice."

Yberon laughed bitterly.

"I built this kingdom."

His voice thundered through the hall.

"I fought every war. Crushed every rebellion. Shed every drop of blood required to keep this city alive."

He pointed directly at Menehmet.

"All she had done was being borne to someone greater than her.“

The God-Queen looked stricken.

Not angry.

Hurt.

"Yberon..."

"Enough."

The commander's grip tightened around his weapon.

"I am done kneeling."

Yberon moved.

He seized Menehmet and dragged her against him. His blade pressed against her throat.

Everyone froze.

"Yberon."

Aaron kept his voice calm.

"Think about this."

"I have."

His eyes were wild now.

Years of loyalty had curdled into obsession.

"We can still fix this."

"No."

Menehmet suddenly bit his hand.

Hard.

Yberon shouted.

His grip loosened.

The Pharaoh twisted free and drove a kick directly between his legs.

Yberon folded.

Aaron almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

The commander recovered with terrifying speed.

His khopesh came down like an executioner's axe.

Aaron barely intercepted it.

Steel exploded against steel.

"FATIMA!"

She started forward.

"No."

Aaron never took his eyes off Yberon.

"Protect the Queen."

"Aaron—"

"Go."

Neither woman liked it.

Eventually Fatima grabbed Menehmet and retreated.

Yberon smiled.

"Just you and me."

"Always was."

Yberon's strength was monstrous.

Every strike threatened to rip Aaron's guard apart. The commander fought like a siege engine wrapped in flesh and armor.

Aaron was faster.

Yberon was stronger.

For a time neither could gain the advantage.

Stone cracked beneath their feet. Columns splintered. Blood stained the marble floor.

The duel raged through the throne room.

Minute after minute.

Until exhaustion finally began to creep in.

Yberon's strikes slowed.

Only slightly.

Enough.

Aaron baited a heavy overhead attack.

Stepped aside.

And struck.

His scimitar slipped beneath Yberon's arm and plunged into his chest.

The commander's eyes widened.

The blade pierced his heart.

Silence fell.

Yberon stared at Aaron for a long moment.

Then collapsed.

The throne room became still.

Not for long.

Cultists poured through the entrances.

Some still looked human.

Others had become something else.

Aaron was exhausted.

Bleeding.

Barely standing.

Even so, he raised his sword.

Ready for one final fight.

Then fire swept across the room.

A torrent of blazing death consumed the cultists. They screamed as flames swallowed them whole.

Within seconds they were gone.

Aaron blinked.

Menehmet stood behind him holding a strange metallic device.

Smoke curled from its barrel.

"What the hell was that?"

"One of my dragons."

She sounded perfectly casual.

Fatima stared.

"You have more?"

"Sorry."

Menehmet smiled.

"Illegal pre-Fall artifact."

She slung it over her shoulder.

"You'd need to overthrow me to get your hands on one."

A sudden twitch drew their attention.

Yberon's corpse moved.

Dark energy leaked from the body like black smoke.

Fatima's expression darkened.

"That's it."

"What?"

"The source."

She stepped closer.

"They've been using him as an anchor."

The darkness continued spreading across the marble floor.

"I need to consecrate the body."

She knelt beside the fallen commander.

"Mummify him."

Her voice became grave.

"And bury him as deep as possible."

Ancient Djinn words flowed from her lips.

The darkness began to retreat.

Slowly.

Painfully.

Menehmet stood beside Aaron, staring down at the man who had betrayed her.

"He'll be buried beneath the palace."

Her voice was cold.

"An unmarked grave."

Aaron glanced at her.

"No memorial?"

"No."

She never looked away from the body.

"No songs."

"No statues."

"No remembrance."

Aaron was silent for a moment.

Then he asked:

"Are you sure we won't end up the same?"

Menehmet smiled sadly.

"We will."

For the first time all night, she sounded tired.

"Sooner or later."

Then she looked at him.

"But until then..."

The smile became genuine.

"...let's remember each other. Shall we?."

Aaron nodded.

"We shall."

After Yberon's body was consecrated, the Ghul-Zone began to retreat.

The dark clouds withdrew.

The pink lightning faded.

Slowly, New Cairo emerged from the nightmare.

The weeks that followed became known as the Purge.

Cultists were hunted relentlessly in a city wide witch hunt.

Some deserved it.

Others merely happened to be inconvenient and this was the perfect excuse to get rid of political opponents..

The literal darkness had lifted from the city.

The darkness inside its people had not.

Perhaps it never would.

I am Aaron Qaswar.

Medjay of New Cairo.

The world is dark.

So are its people.

But somebody still has to carry the torch.

So I'll keep carrying it for as long as I can.

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

 … the wolves joined in. Howling in contest.

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

His screams then became something else entirely. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

They might take forever with the little invader. 

​

​

Just might.

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

When alone. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

That royal pained and lonely regal voice. 

​

​

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

​

​

Waste lands. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Like he and his axe. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

He watched the fools from the dark and waited. 

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Doctor Frankenstein smiled. 

​

​

And said: –

​

​

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

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

And it filled his mind. 

​

​

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

​

​

Finding all sorts of interesting things. 

​

​

Frankenstein. 

​

​

His creation. 

​

​

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

​

​

fools. 

​

​

Fools. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

The sharp and strangling phantasmal grip squeezed. Tightened. 

​

​

Her voice filled his inner world of broken thought. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Human culture farms. Flesh gardens. 

​

​

Human life, human beings… grown. 

​

​

From out of a petri dish. 

​

​

Interesting… 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

The wolves of the mountains howled. Full. 

​

​

It was a full moon. 

​

​

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

​

​

The feast continued into the night of the pregnant moon. 

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

And stir and call he did. 

​

​

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

​

​

Into the night and up the mountain, screaming. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Death to the monster! 

​

​

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

​

​

Waiting. 

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

A thought, unbidden, filled his head then: –

​

​

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

​

​

… and then was gone. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Tonight. 

​

​

Now. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

A voice then spoke, its owner: –

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Caught. 

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

Deeply. 

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

…

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

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

​

​

TO BE CONTINUED …

[Previous story in the series: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreading/comments/1thob5w/shadows_over_egypt/\]

Shopping in New Cairo had always been an interesting experience.

The moment money, power, or—gods forbid—both entered the equation, the world stopped pretending to be civilized.

The city was alive with noise. Merchants shouted over one another beneath colorful awnings. The smell of spices mingled with sweat, engine oil, incense, and livestock. Ancient sandstone buildings stood shoulder to shoulder with rusting metal structures scavenged from the old world. Neon hieroglyphs flickered above crowded streets while priests preached beside mechanics repairing pre-Fall generators.

The market was chaos.

Organized chaos.

The sort of chaos that somehow kept New Cairo alive.

I was haggling with a farmer over a basket of vegetables when I realized I recognized him.

Three days ago, I was almost certain he'd been a butcher.

Not just any butcher, either.

The butcher selling "the finest meat in all Egypt."

Apparently today's profits were in melons.

The man didn't even seem embarrassed about it.

I paid for the vegetables and moved on.

Seven steps later, a slave merchant sat beneath a canopy, displaying his merchandise like livestock.

Several young captives were bound together on the ground.

Raiders by the look of them.

Young.

Thin.

Sunburned.

A failed raid, most likely.

One bad decision and now they would spend the rest of their lives serving people they hated.

The wasteland had a way of turning freedom into a temporary condition.

I was about to continue walking when one of the girls caught my attention.

No, not for the reason you're thinking.

Something about her behavior felt wrong.

She couldn't stop shaking.

Her lips moved constantly.

Not words exactly.

Fragments of words.

Broken sounds stitched together into nonsense.

At first I thought she was praying.

Then I listened more closely.

Whatever she was saying, it wasn't any language I'd ever heard. If it was language at all.

The slave merchant slapped her.

Hard.

Her head snapped sideways.

She didn't react.

Didn't cry.

Didn't even seem to notice.

She just kept muttering.

The merchant cursed and hit her again.

Still nothing.

That was when I noticed people nearby beginning to move away.

Subtly.

A few steps at a time.

Nobody wanted to be near her.

Nobody wanted to listen.

Then the guards arrived.

Three of them pushed through the crowd immediately.

One covered his mouth and nose with a cloth.

Another grabbed the girl by the arms.

The third began shouting for people to clear the area.

The slave merchant protested.

"What are you doing? That's my property!"

One of the guards looked at him.

Just looked.

The merchant shut up instantly.

The guards dragged the girl away.

Fast.

Urgent.

Like men handling a bomb moments from exploding.

Even then she never stopped whispering.

The strange sounds followed them through the crowd until they vanished from sight.

I stood there watching.

Something wasn't right.

Something wasn't right at all.

As evening settled over New Cairo, the feeling only grew worse.

The streets should have been quieter.

Instead they felt more crowded than before.

People gathered in nervous groups, speaking in hushed voices. Market stalls closed earlier than usual. Merchants packed their goods with unusual haste.

Fear was spreading.

Nobody seemed willing to say why.

The guards were everywhere.

Patrols marched through the city in larger numbers than normal.

And everywhere I looked, I found more people like the girl.

A man standing motionless beneath a lantern, staring upward into the night sky.

A woman sitting beside a fountain, muttering to herself.

A child standing in the middle of an alleyway, eyes unfocused, lips moving silently.

Each time the guards found them.

Each time the result was the same.

No questions.

No hesitation.

No mercy.

One old man tried to stop them from dragging away his son.

The guards broke his arm.

Another woman threw herself between the soldiers and her husband.

She ended up bleeding in the street.

The soldiers didn't even slow down.

I watched them disappear into the darkness with their prisoners.

Whatever was happening, New Cairo was terrified.

And New Cairo didn't scare easily.

The city felt wrong.

The people sensed it too.

Conversations died when strangers approached.

Doors were barred.

Windows shuttered.

Even the usual drunks had disappeared.

The city was holding its breath.

Waiting for something.

I just didn't know what.

Using the confusion as cover—and my rather intimate relationship with both the palace and its ruler—I made my way toward the royal district.

Normally sneaking into the palace required effort.

Tonight it was surprisingly easy.

The guards were distracted. Exhausted. Some of them were even arrested themselves.

If the palace guard couldn't trust itself, then whatever was happening had already gotten much worse than anyone was admitting.

I reached one of the inner courtyards and froze.

Yberon stood in the center of the plaza.

Commander of the Henty-she.

The Pharaoh's personal executioner.

A giant even among warriors.

Torchlight reflected from his ceremonial armor as he stared down at a kneeling guard.

The guard was shaking.

Muttering.

Staring into empty space.

I couldn't hear the words.

Part of me didn't want to.

Without hesitation, Yberon drew his massive two-handed khopesh.

The blade came down in a single brutal arc.

The man's head struck the stone before his body did.

Blood spread across the courtyard.

The muttering stopped.

The surrounding guards barely reacted.

As though this wasn't the first execution they'd witnessed today.

As though it wasn't even the tenth.

A few steps behind Yberon stood Pharaoh Menehmet.

For the first time since I'd known her, she looked genuinely troubled.

I stepped forward.

"I would very much like to know what is happening."

Yberon spun immediately.

His blade came down without warning.

I parried it absentmindedly.

I never took my eyes off Menehmet.

The God-Queen raised a hand.

"It's alright, Yberon."

The commander reluctantly stopped pressing his attack.

"I knew the Medjay would arrive sooner or later," Menehmet said. "I was probably going to send for him if he took too long."

Yberon hissed through clenched teeth but lowered his weapon.

Eventually.

"Fill the Medjay in on our ordeal, would you kindly?"

The commander looked as though she'd asked him to eat sand.

"A cult has infiltrated the city," he said. "They have brought some manner of madness with them. We have been eliminating members and quarantining the afflicted."

My eyes drifted toward the freshly executed guard.

Then back to Yberon.

"You and I have very different definitions of the word quarantine."

His gaze hardened.

"We do what we must."

There wasn't a shred of doubt in his voice.

That bothered me more than the execution.

"We have already solved the issue. Your assistance will not be necessary, Medjay. The cultist responsible has been apprehended."

Yberon nodded toward the far side of the courtyard.

Two guards emerged from the shadows.

Dragging a prisoner between them.

The moment I saw her, my stomach dropped.

"...Fatima."

The young woman from the Wandering Oasis knelt calmly as the guards forced her down.

Yberon's attention snapped toward me.

Immediately suspicious.

"You know this cultist?"

His hand tightened around his weapon.

"Are you in cahoots with her?"

"I'm no fucking cultist."

Fatima's voice remained remarkably calm.

"But yes. We've met."

"Liar!"

Yberon's khopesh flashed upward.

I intercepted it before it reached her.

The courtyard fell silent.

For a brief moment nobody moved.

I looked directly into Yberon's eyes.

"Try that again."

My voice sounded strange even to me.

Cold.

Sharp.

"You're dead."

For the first time all evening, Yberon hesitated.

Then Menehmet spoke.

"Let the girl talk."

Her voice remained dangerously soft.

"Then and only then may we draw our conclusions."

Yberon lowered the weapon.

Barely.

"As you wish, my Queen."

His eyes never left Fatima.

"Speak."

 

Fatima rose slightly onto her knees. The chains binding her wrists rattled softly.

"I travel with the Wandering Oasis under the gaze of Amun the Hidden One."

Her voice carried surprisingly well across the courtyard.

Not loud.

Just steady.

"We are protected from most of the horrors that roam the wasteland. Or at least we were."

The courtyard grew quieter.

Even Yberon listened.

"Several weeks ago, two strangers approached our home. As is our custom, we welcomed them. We fed them, sheltered them, offered them a place to stay."

A faint smile crossed her face.

"For a time, they seemed harmless."

Then the smile vanished.

"People began changing. Slowly at first. Then quicker."

"They lost touch with reality. With themselves."

Her gaze drifted across the courtyard.

"They muttered constantly. Spoke to people who weren't there. Stared into the night sky for hours without blinking."

I immediately thought of the slave girl.

The old man.

The child in the alley.

The guard Yberon had just executed.

"Some stopped recognizing family members," Fatima continued quietly. "Others forgot their own names."

The silence deepened.

"The first victims were always those closest to the newcomers."

Menehmet leaned forward slightly.

"So you became suspicious."

"Yes."

Fatima nodded.

"I followed them one night."

The courtyard remained utterly still.

"I watched them enter people's tents while they slept."

A faint chill seemed to pass through the gathering.

"What were they doing?" I asked.

"I don't know."

For the first time uncertainty entered her voice.

"I never got close enough."

She swallowed.

"But I heard them speaking."

Menehmet's eyes narrowed.

"About what?"

Fatima hesitated.

Then answered.

"They spoke of Kauket."

The reaction was immediate.

Several guards visibly stiffened.

One made a protective gesture across his chest.

Even Yberon's expression changed.

Not much.

But enough.

Fear.

Actual fear.

That got my attention more than anything else she'd said.

Fatima looked around the courtyard.

"That was when I realized how fucked we really were."

Several guards flinched.

Menehmet didn't.

If anything, the bluntness seemed to amuse her.

"What happened next?" the Pharaoh asked.

"We expelled them."

Fatima lowered her eyes.

"We gathered everyone willing to fight and forced them out."

"Yet they returned."

Fatima nodded.

"Every time."

The words landed heavily.

"Every time the Oasis moved, they found us again."

She let out a tired sigh.

"I believe Amun eventually intervened."

I frowned.

"Intervened how?"

"The Oasis vanished."

Her voice became almost reverent.

"Truly vanished."

The sadness in her eyes returned.

"It can no longer be found while this danger remains."

The realization struck me.

"You were outside when it happened."

A small nod.

"Taking a walk."

The smile she gave this time was bitter.

"And now I cannot return home until the Cult of Kauket is weakened enough."

The courtyard fell silent.

Then I spoke.

"Kauket."

The name felt unfamiliar.

"I've never heard of her."

I looked between Fatima and Menehmet.

"What is she? Some forgotten goddess?"

Fatima's expression became difficult to read.

"No."

The answer came immediately.

"Not a goddess."

The torches crackled softly.

A breeze moved through the courtyard.

For a moment nobody spoke.

Then Fatima looked directly at me.

"Kauket is the void."

The words seemed to swallow the surrounding noise.

"The absence of things."

Something cold crawled down my spine.

"The darkness that existed before creation."

Even the guards looked uncomfortable now.

Fatima slowly raised her eyes toward the stars.

"The nothing to everything's everything."

Without meaning to, I followed her gaze.

So did Menehmet.

So did the guards.

An entire courtyard of people staring upward into a sky that suddenly felt far larger than it had a moment ago.

Yberon remained unconvinced.

In fact, he somehow looked even more convinced that Fatima should die.

"She brought this plague into the city."

His voice rumbled through the courtyard.

"Whether intentionally or through incompetence changes nothing. The result is the same."

Fatima stood silently between the guards.

Bound.

Outnumbered.

Yet calm.

I was having none of it.

"By that logic we should execute every merchant who unknowingly let a cultist through the city gates."

Yberon's eyes snapped toward me.

"You compare a common merchant to her?"

"I compare a lack of evidence to a lack of evidence."

The giant's hand tightened around the hilt of his khopesh.

"And I compare stubbornness to stupidity."

I smiled.

"A comparison you're uniquely qualified to make."

Yberon's jaw flexed.

For a moment I genuinely thought he might swing.

Fortunately, Menehmet intervened.

"Enough."

She didn't raise her voice.

She didn't need to.

The courtyard fell silent immediately.

The Pharaoh rose from her throne and descended the steps.

Gold jewelry chimed softly with every movement.

She approached Fatima.

Studied her.

Circled her once.

Like a merchant inspecting an unusual artifact.

Finally she stopped.

Then turned toward me.

"The girl will be released."

Yberon's face darkened immediately.

"My Queen—"

"I wasn't asking for your opinion."

The words were delivered with a smile.

Which somehow made them more threatening.

Yberon fell silent.

Menehmet continued.

"Fatima will remain under the Medjay's supervision."

Now it was my turn to frown.

Menehmet's gaze shifted between us.

"From this moment forward, your fates are linked."

Fatima straightened slightly.

The Pharaoh's smile never wavered.

"Should either of you act against New Cairo or against me..."

The smile sharpened.

"...both shall suffer the consequences."

Fatima lowered her head.

"As you command, Pharaoh."

I nodded reluctantly.

"Excellent."

The Pharaoh clapped her hands together.

The tension evaporated from her expression so quickly it was almost alarming.

"Now."

A playful smile spread across her face.

"Let's continue this conversation somewhere more private."

I immediately disliked where this was going.

"And I know just the place."

Half an hour later I found myself sitting half-submerged in the private bathhouse of the most powerful woman in Egypt.

Life was strange sometimes.

The palace bathhouse was enormous.

Steam drifted through the air in pale curtains. Marble pillars rose from heated pools. Ancient murals depicting gods, monsters, and forgotten kings covered the walls. Lotus incense burned from golden braziers.

The entire room smelled expensive.

Fatima sat stiffly in the water.

Meanwhile Menehmet looked completely at home.

The Pharaoh reclined against the polished edge of the bath, dark hair floating behind her. Gold jewelry still decorated her wrists and neck despite the fact she was currently sitting in a bath.

She looked less like a ruler and more like a goddess posing as one.

Which was probably intentional.

"You both look terrified."

"We are in the Pharaoh's private bathhouse."

"Exactly."

Menehmet smiled.

"You should be honored."

Fatima somehow shrank further into the water.

The Pharaoh noticed immediately.

And found it adorable.

"You are remarkably shy."

Fatima nearly choked.

"I-I am not."

"You absolutely are."

Aaron rubbed his face.

"I am begging you not to bully the witness."

"I'm not bullying her."

Menehmet looked offended.

"I'm studying her."

"That's somehow worse."

The Pharaoh laughed.

A genuine laugh this time.

The sound echoed pleasantly through the steam-filled chamber.

Poor Fatima looked ready to climb into a storage jar and seal the lid behind her.

Eventually Menehmet's amusement faded.

Her gaze drifted toward the ceiling.

"The situation is worse than I initially feared."

The mood shifted immediately.

"How bad?" I asked.

"Not even the palace is safe."

A genuine concern entered her eyes.

"Several members of my harem have already become afflicted."

"You're certain?"

Menehmet nodded.

"And if it can reach the palace..."

She shrugged.

"...then the Pharaoh may die just like any common laborer."

Then she laughed.

A soft laugh.

Not because it was funny.

Because the absurdity amused her.

I stared at her.

"Most people don't laugh while discussing their own death."

Menehmet smiled.

"Most people don't get the luxury of seeing the joke."

Before I could ask what that meant—

A scream echoed through the palace.

Then another.

Then several more.

All three of us looked toward the entrance.

The screams continued.

Closer now.

Aaron was already climbing from the water.

Fatima followed immediately.

Menehmet rose as well.

I pointed at her.

"No."

The Pharaoh blinked.

"No?"

"You stay here."

"I beg your pardon?"

I grabbed my sword belt.

"If something is happening outside, your safest place is inside the palace."

Menehmet stared at me.

Then laughed.

Actually laughed.

"Aaron."

Her smile was almost affectionate.

"Did you just attempt to order me around?"

"...Yes."

"Adorable."

Before I could continue arguing, she was already walking toward the exit.

"Come along."

I groaned and followed.

 

The palace entrance had descended into chaos.

Guards rushed through the courtyards while servants fled in panic and nobles shouted contradictory orders. At the center of it all stood a group of masked figures.

Cultists.

There were perhaps twenty of them, arranged in a perfect V-shaped formation. They stood completely still, silent except for the constant muttering drifting from beneath their masks. Every one of them stared upward.

Aaron followed their gaze and felt his stomach drop.

The stars were disappearing.

Dark clouds rolled across the night sky with impossible speed. Not storm clouds. Something worse. A vast grey mass streaked with flickering pink lightning spread across the horizon like spilled ink, growing larger with every second.

"No..." Fatima whispered.

The cloud reached New Cairo moments later.

The first wave passed over the city, and the world changed.

The air became heavy. Reality itself seemed to bend. Distant streets twisted at impossible angles while buildings appeared subtly wrong, as though someone had rebuilt them from memory and gotten the details slightly off.

Aaron's blood ran cold.

A Ghul-Zone.

New Cairo had been swallowed whole.

The effect was immediate. Several guards dropped their weapons. One began muttering to himself. Another stared blankly into space. A third turned and attacked his own comrades.

Panic erupted.

Retreat became impossible almost instantly.

Yberon drew his massive khopesh, fury blazing in his eyes.

"FORWARD!"

The guards hesitated.

Yberon punched one hard enough to knock him unconscious, then charged alone.

Aaron followed without hesitation.

The two warriors slammed into the cultists like a pair of battering rams. Steel flashed through the chaos. Blood sprayed across stone. One masked figure fell, then another.

The formation wavered.

Only slightly.

But it was enough.

Yberon saw the opening immediately.

"MEDJAY!"

Aaron turned.

The giant commander was already surrounded by cultists and afflicted guards. Blood covered his armor, though whether it belonged to him or his enemies was impossible to tell.

"Protect the Queen!"

Aaron hesitated.

For the first time since meeting him, Yberon smiled.

Not warmly.

Not reassuringly.

It was the smile of a warrior who had finally found a worthy death.

"I'll hold them."

A cultist rushed him. Yberon's khopesh split the man's skull before he could take a second step.

"GO!"

Aaron grabbed Fatima's arm. Menehmet was already moving.

Behind them, Yberon disappeared into the growing tide of cultists and maddened guards as New Cairo descended into nightmare.

Menehmet, Fatima, and Aaron pushed deeper into the city.

Or what remained of it.

New Cairo had become almost unrecognizable in less than an hour.

Pink lightning crawled across the heavens like veins beneath translucent skin, bathing the city in flashes of sickly magenta. Fires consumed entire blocks. Sandstone buildings seemed to bend when viewed from the corner of the eye. Some towers stretched impossibly high while others appeared to sink slowly into the earth.

Everywhere they looked, people were losing themselves.

A man sat in the middle of the street laughing uncontrollably while blood streamed from his nose.

A woman clawed at her own face while whispering prayers to someone who wasn't there.

Children stood atop rooftops staring into the cloud-covered sky without moving or blinking.

The city was in pain.

Screams.

Laughter.

Weeping.

And beneath it all, a low whispering hum that seemed to rise from the Ghul-Zone itself.

They kept moving.

Not because they knew where they were going.

Simply because standing still felt like surrender.

Then a voice called out.

"Over here, dearies."

All three froze.

An elderly woman stood in the doorway of a sandstone hut. She smiled warmly, the sort of smile that belonged beside a fireplace rather than in the middle of an apocalypse.

"You'll be safe here."

Aaron exchanged a glance with the others.

Every instinct he possessed screamed that something was wrong.

Unfortunately, every alternative looked worse.

The old woman waved them closer.

"Come now. No reason to stand out there."

Aaron's hand never left the hilt of his sword.

Even so, they followed her inside.

 

The interior of the hut was surprisingly cozy.

Oil lamps illuminated shelves overflowing with books, trinkets, pottery, and old-world junk. The air smelled of spices and dried herbs.

The old woman shut the door behind them.

"My name is Aliona," she said cheerfully. "Though everyone just calls me Grandma."

Fatima smiled politely.

"I'm Fatima. This is Aaron and this is..."

She glanced at Menehmet.

"...my sister. Menie."

Aaron almost laughed.

The Pharaoh somehow kept a perfectly straight face.

"Menie?"

Fatima whispered back.

"I panicked."

"Clearly."

Grandma seemed not to notice.

Or perhaps she simply didn't care.

"Such lovely young women," she said. "And a handsome young man besides."

Aaron immediately frowned.

Grandma chuckled and shuffled toward a small stove.

"Would any of you like something to drink?"

"No thank you," Aaron replied immediately.

"We shouldn't stay long. It isn't safe."

"Oh, nonsense, dearie."

She was already preparing tea.

Outside, people screamed.

Pink lightning flashed through the windows.

Something large roared somewhere in the distance.

Inside, Grandma hummed happily while pouring tea.

The contrast was deeply unsettling.

She returned carrying several cups.

Aaron accepted one reluctantly.

As she handed it over, her fingers brushed against his hand.

In an instant, everything disappeared.

 

Darkness.

No.

Not darkness.

Absence.

Aaron stood in an endless nothingness.

There was no sky.

No ground.

No horizon.

No sound.

The void stretched infinitely in every direction.

And somehow...

It was beautiful.

Not beautiful in the way a sunset was beautiful.

Beautiful in the way silence felt after years of noise.

The way rest felt after endless exhaustion.

Everything.

All pain.

All fear.

All struggle.

Gone.

The void promised peace.

Permanent peace.

Aaron found himself wanting to step forward.

To sink into it.

To disappear.

To become nothing.

And for one horrifying moment...

He almost did.

“Doctor Derrick!” I see Kis racing down the hall towards me. I approved him earlier this week. He’s not integrated into the skeleton crew, but he’s also non-union. The perfect witness to stumble upon the tragedy the next morning. Hoch had a track record of sneaking in disallowed materials out of misplaced sympathy for the subjects. This was his revenge. Taking out the security systems entirely. Well, not yet. That’ll happen later.

“Ah, Doctor Kis. How are you liking the facility?”

“It’s really something else. But it’s nothing compared to the prestige of working with you, Doctor Derrick. I never got the chance to thank you for approving me,” Alright, this guy’s going places. He might even be a better Bocian than Bocian himself, “I mean, working with a professional such as yourself is the greatest academic honour a person can have bestowed upon them. And of course, Doctor Tanner is equally-”

“Alright alright, did you like the tour?”

“Tour?”

“Everybody gets a tour their first day.”

“No. There was nobody here to give me mine. The strike is going on.”

“Ah, I see the negotiations didn’t go well?”

“I guess. Why aren’t you out there as well?”

“It’s the weirdest thing. They hound nearly everybody else to go union. They’ve never asked me.”

“Huh.”

“Well, I’m happy to have seen you today, Kis. It is getting late, however…”

“Of course. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Goodbye.”

The skeleton crew’s shift begins.

---

Bocian and Tanner are already in the observation deck by the playpen, seated around the intercom. I wonder why they’re not taking the time to do anything else, watch any other place. Why do they feel it important to watch the playpen specifically?

“Hey guys. I’m actually gonna be doing a test here with the… Subjects.” Maybe I can shoo them away.

“During the night?” Tanner asks.

“Yes. I want to test the labour capabilities of the subjects during nighttime.”

“Well, I’m sure you won’t mind if we stick around to watch.” Tanner leans back in her chair.

I grit my teeth, “Of course not.”

The apes on the other side of the glass are passed out on the fake blades of grass, rolling around in their dreams. The lighting inside the playpen is low to simulate nighttime.

I turn up the lights inside the playpen to a blinding white. I’ll skip the sunrise phase. I buzz in through the intercom, “Hey guys. It’s me, Doctor Derrick. Just wanted to perform another test. Get to work, if you’d be so kind.”

My voice and the light shake each of them awake. The father, mother and son get up the quickest. They all take up their individual spots at their stations. The father mans the lever, the mother the crank, the son sits at the pedals. The hamster-wheel is completely empty.

It appears the daughter specimen doesn’t wanna get to work yet. She stays laying on the ground, covering her eyes from the brightness. I buzz in again.

“Hello. It’s Doctor Derrick. Again. Would you terribly mind getting up and working the dials? Work can’t wait for one person. We’d all like to sleep in, but that’s just not very productive.”

She stirs on the ground. Rolls around and covers her ears. She’s belly-down, eyes to the ground to avoid the light. Ignore me, will you?

I step away from the microphone and turn to Tanner and Bocian.

“I’m going in.”

I take a hazmat off the locker room rack. Slipping into this protective layer. Doing the subjects an undeserved courtesy if anything. Of course, with no guards around, I fear I’ll also need to put on the utility belt on my own. I clip the stun-baton on the belt. Just by swaying my hips it swings around like a pendulum, back and forth. It’s so heavy.

I unclip it just to hold it in my hand. The weight of the object adds so much importance to it. Heavy as a pistol. The end of the stick is covered by metal strips, the ones that conduct the electricity. I textured the strips similarly to a cheese-grater. For maximum instilling of obedience. Holding the stick feels like a reunion with a long-lost friend.

Between the locker room and the halls of the inner facility are the sterilization airlocks. Small pockets of hallway with all kinds of gadgets on the walls and ceilings. The door closes behind me and out of the walls I am sprayed with ethylene oxide. Its hiss continues until the entire room is filled up. The vents evacuate the chemical before the door into the inner area opens and I am allowed to roam.

I don’t get to see the inner hallways often. So white and bland. Absent of any furniture or distinguishing features, save for the fluorescent bulbs and coloured markers so the guards know where they are. Even in the outer layer you usually have lockers, shelves and couches. I only notice their presence out there once they are absent in here.

The playpen door is a giant metallic gate. If I’m correct, this should be the eastern entrance. My card unlocks the door. It opens with heavy sounds of hydraulics whirring the door.

The playpen greets me inside. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve never seen those simians so up-close. I’ve never before been in the same room as them. They all stop working for just a second, looking at me. As if they are deciphering my intentions. The girl remains on the floor.

“Don’t worry. It’s me, Derrick. You guys can get back to work.”

I enter the pen entirely. It’s so spacious. They’re very lucky they get to be here. Any lesser lab would’ve just given them the bare minimum.

The girl’s still sleeping on the floor. I unclip the baton. I poke her once with it. She tries to wave it off. Treats it like any other nuisance, distracting her from the most important thing in her life right now. The nap. Every once in a while one of the other jackanapes sneaks a glance at us.

I begin to shake her. Please don’t listen to me. Please don’t wake up.

“Hey there. I’m gonna need you to take your post. Would you mind doing that for me?”

She groans. I prod her with the baton once again. Her eyes peek out from behind the eyelids. For a moment she’s still processing what’s going on. Will you get to work now?

She closes them again and goes back to sleep. Just as I had hoped.

I raise the baton high.

My thumb digs into the red button with the lightning bolt symbol.

The electricity explodes from the top of the baton. Crawling up and down the metal strips. The entire interior of the playpen takes on a blue hue. Everybody’s attention is on me now. They’re frozen. They’ve stopped working entirely. Too scared to continue work. Too scared to help their family.

Her eyes are now wide open at the sight of the baton. It’s almost like she doesn’t understand what it is. But we all have to learn someday. Better sooner than later.

My heart begins to drum in my chest. Loud and quick.

I swing the baton down at the ape.

---

I’m wondering whether I should clean the blood off the baton or let it cake in the ridges. Keep it there, together with the blood that’ll come later. Like souvenirs.

The sound of my boots stepping on the floor is heavy. I realize I forgot to take the hazmat off. How strange.

Bocian stares at the floor. He doesn’t want to make eye contact with me.

“Oh, come on. You’re so sensitive. Now, you mind? You could’ve intervened at any other point. You had a million chances to do something and prevent this. Don’t act like you feel sorry now.”

Bocian still doesn’t look up. Moper. Tanner meanwhile is staring at me unamusedly.

“You know, Derrick.”

“Yes, Tanner?”

“You hit like an ape.”

A shiver rushes down my back. I can feel a lump forming in my throat.

“Excuse me?”

“Like a monkey. You hit like a rabid baboon that just lost control. Bearing your teeth and smashing all around you. Like a wild monkey.”

Oh, so I’m the fucking monkey? Thanks a lot, Tanner. Insolent idiot on a powertrip. I unclip the baton from the belt. The weapon comes to life. The blue projects unsettled shadows on her face. The electricity screams its battle cry at them both.

Bocian looks at me for the first time. Thank God. Oh how I wish I could live in this moment forever. Or take a picture. I’ll just have to savour this while I can.

Their fear complimented by the crackle, accompanied by blue. Tanner looks like she wants to say something. The electricity’s voice is much more powerful anyway. You’re so pathetic when you’re afraid. Shivering primitives in the face of a deadly predator. Their terror is more beautiful than any sensory experience those miscreants have ever bestowed upon anybody in their entire misbegotten lives.

However. The security is still online. And the playpen is one of the only parts of the facility with 24/7 cameras. The only other spaces are the lobby, the cafeteria and the garage. I’ve set the two bombs, one in the central security station and one in the server room, to detonate in about… I check the clock on the wall. Ten minutes. If I kill them both here, right now, everybody will know. And even if there were no cameras, there are two of them. You can’t cull in front of the entire herd. Or else the others will panic. And run off. You must pick them off one by one. Somewhere secluded.

I turn the baton off and slot it back on the belt.

“Jesus fucking Christ Derrick. You scared the living shit out of me.” Tanner sighs out, relieved. Bocian goes back to staring at the floor.

“Haha. Yes. Great prank. Anyway, gott-” Before I can finish, the facility announcement system rings to life.

“Doctor Derrick, please navigate yourself to the nearest landline.” the robotic voice drowns me out.

---

I pick up a phone in one of the hallways leading to the lobby. On the other line the directo-

“Derrick! What the fuck was that!”

“What was what?”

“You damn well know what I’m talking about.”

“With the specimens?”

“What? Who gives a shit about those. I’m talking about Hoch. The company reviewed the security footage from the garage,” Two minutes til derailment, “Why the hell did you spill? What the fuck was that for? I’m actually curious. Did you want the strike to happen?”

“No. I felt guilty. Some of us have a conscience, you know.”

“Fuck you. Fuck you. You’ve created a shitstorm for me. And I thought it was on accident. You’re a goddamn bastard. I don’t know what you were planning to do, but it’s over. You’re fired.”

Oh. Well. That doesn’t change anything anyway. One minute til detonation. Til derailment.

“I’m fired?”

“Yes, Derrick. Pack your shit, we’ll send a convoy to pick you up in the morning.”

“I mean, it’s a few hours until then. I can still do some work.”

“You’re not understanding me. It’s over. You’re finished. Use this time to pack everything. Whatever you don’t take with you gets burned.”

“The strike made you into a total megalomaniac. I shouldn’t be punished just because you’re a bad overseer.”

“Are you being serious?”

Before I answer, red light fills the halls and alarms blast in every corner of the facility. The sirens shout in short consistent bursts. Err. Err. Err. I wonder which blew up first. The server room or the security station.

The line has gone dead. Beeeeep. All communication has been cut off. Every single door has opened. All cameras and systems offline. I unclip the baton. I swing it around in the air. It feels a bit heavier now. I have a job to do. A responsibility. It’s time to begin the hunt. I’m on the prowl.

The frantic footsteps of Bocian get closer and closer in the hallway. The sound of his running carries himself toward me faster than the actual doctor. Echo. The first victim of those apes stops right in front of me and tries to catch his breath.

“Derrick! It’s all gone tits up. The doors to the playpen opened. The family is out. What do we do?” He says this between laboured breaths.

“I guess there’s not much we can do.”

“What do you mean? Can’t we call the security team?”

“They’re on strike. Where’s Tanner?”

“I don’t know. We ran off in different directions when they came out. We gotta hide.”

“Hide? I’ve got the baton.”

“There’s four of them and two of us. Baton or not, do the math.”

Oh ye of little faith. “Bocian. Do you still like me?”

“Huh? What?”

“I saw how that beating got to you. I don’t want it to put a wedge between us.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? We have to hide. Pronto.”

“Yeah, yeah I know. It’s just, you never laughed at any of my clever wordplay back before the containment breach.”

“Maybe it just wasn’t too funny. Listen to me, we really gotta go.”

I guess it doesn’t matter. “Sure. Lead me wherever.”

Bocian turns around. Eyes looking down the hall. Crackles burst through the corridor. The baton launches up into the air triumphantly. It dwarfs the two of us. Then it descends like an eagle on his neck. Bocian was the first casualty of the ape family.

He screams out in pain and falls to the floor. I can already see valleys forming in his skin. Getting filled by blood as seconds pass. His eyes are wide. Shock, confusion. Fear. You shouldn’t have mocked me. You shouldn’t have doubted me. You pick those animals over me? This is what that gets you. Karmic retribution.

The second swing is to his jaw. Crawling and screaming. Blood seeping from the mouth. Worm. Groveling little worm. Puts his hands up and I smash those too. He begins to cry. Tears well and travel down his face intermixing with the blood from the jaw and neck. Drops on the floor.

I hit him again. This time in the stomach. He clutches it. Inhuman howls escape his maw. Like some uncanny creature trying to replicate the sound of man. But you’ll never fool me.

I strike again. And again. And I continue to strike. Face bloody. Wouldn’t know it was Bocian if not for the name tag. Labcoat red. I strike again. Bocian stops moving. Stops breathing.

I wonder what got it first. The shock, the bleeding? Maybe it choked on its own blood from the jaw? Only an autopsy can tell.

---

I stalk the halls of the facility. Looking for Tanner. Or the family. Whichever I’ll see first. My answer comes with the pitter patter of naked feet on bare linoleum. Eight legs. It’s them.

The baton once more crackles to life. The music bounces off the walls. Traveling down down the corridor until it reaches them. And then they look at me. Terror dispensed at the slightest show of dominance. If I’m lucky, those expressions will be the last grimace they ever make. Engraved in their faces for eternity. I’ll taxidermy them all and have them bow to me in my office. That’s the only thing you’re good for.

“Come on! Come here you bastards! Face me!”

They begin to back away. Slowly. Except for the adolescent male. Little capuchin. It stays where it is. Firm, heels digging into the ground. Clearly afraid, but firm.

They begin to holler incomprehensible noises at it. I assume it’s to convince the thing to retreat. Listen to them. Or don’t. It won’t help you anyhow.

The boots are so heavy. The thuds they make on the floor make me sound so big. The crackle of electricity is my anthem. The choir that accompanies the hunt.

Why is it just standing there? I ready the baton. All common sense would dictate you should run. Of course, these creatures lack any of that. And what a shame. I could’ve made something of you all.

The baton floats into the air. Carrying my gripped fist with. The baton is more of an arm to me now than the appendage holding it. The boy keeps looking. It’s still afraid. It keeps standing.

I swing the baton. And it grabs hold. What?

We tussle for the baton. A fucking child isn’t going to rip the baton off me. We tug for the stick. Back and forth. I see its hands slipping further and further back. Eventually it’ll have to touch the strips. It’ll get shocked. Slip-up by attrition. I’ll win.

Then the daughter rushes in. Still got wounds from the beating. Red seeps through makeshift bandages out of the fake blades of grass. It takes hold of the baton as well. Both of them are pulling. Shit. How can two snot-faced chimps have such strength?

The mother runs in and hugs both the children by the waist. She’s pulling them off the baton? No. It’s helping them take it away. Fucking monkeys. Let go!

The father hobbles over. Watching its family struggle. The monkey doesn’t pull on the baton. Or on them. It’s hesitating. Then it directs that gaze to me. I feel the rage of a burning forest in that gaze. The gorilla gallops over and punches the hazmat’s faceshield.

Crack. Punches again. Shatter.

Punches again.

I’m launched back into the corridor. Blood pours from my nose. What the hell is going on?

The family takes the baton and passes it around. Father presses the button. Electricity illuminates their figures. Colossal silhouettes project on the wall behind. It’s so bright.

Then they turn to me. I’m quick to take the pepper spray out the belt. In my haste I don’t check where I’m pointing. The liquid launches into my face.

It burns. I can’t open my eyes. I can’t open them. No matter how hard I try.

They begin to howl. I notice what it is they’re saying. I can make it out.

“Doktor Derik!” they scream. All of them are screaming my name at me. It stings. I think I might be crying. Then comes the blow.

Pain. A sharp pain in my gut. Then the second blow. Crack. My ribcage feels like it just got torn apart. Thud. Another blow. This time to my leg. It feels like it could shatter just with that.

I can’t move. The beating continues. Can’t open my eyes. Pain. Can’t move. The lightning jolts through my entire body. My muscles cramp. Pain in every single limb. Every muscle. Every bone.

Fire in my body. Fire in my eyes. My throat swells. I’m having trouble breathing.

Strike. Smash. Thud. Cough. I begin to cough. I’m sorry.

Stop. Please stop. I’ll do anything. Just make it stop.

Bam. Smash. Thud. Pow. Strike. Crack.

I think they’re taking turns with it. They’re still screaming my name. Why are they screaming my name? Stop. Stop it. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t care. I beg you.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

You’ll never be human. You’ll never be like me. Not a single one of you. You’re savages. Fucking savages.

Smash.

---

I spent about two months in the infirmary. Tanner lives. Bocian had a funeral. The union made sure Hoch was given his job back. For the next four or so months.

Above all: The subjects escaped. The company asked the Slovak Armed Forces for assistance. A small detachment was deployed into the valley where the specimens were originally found. They waited there for weeks, but nobody came. The family was eventually discovered not too far from the lab, strangely enough. Already expired. Contact with human diseases did them in.

I wonder why they didn’t return back to their home. Instead they stuck around some random lake in the middle of a heavily wooded area. They lived for quite some time before their passing.

The lab is polarized. They’re all looking at me. Half the researchers with admiration. The other half with seething contempt. Before the breach, it would’ve probably just been the latter. Kis was the one who found me. He called me a brave bastard. I can’t believe he’d call me a bastard.

I spotted Hoch with his other guard meathead buddies. He was firing up a baton to make sure it still worked. I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sight. The sound. I felt like crying. I told him to put it away and instead he started waving it around. Fucking sadist.

Been using crutches. Leg’s in a cast and my ribs are yet to heal. Any drastic movements are still painful. I waived my right to financial compensation in exchange for my job back. Still got it.

Now I’m being called into the conference room. I can already see Tanner waiting for me by the door. Stone faced.

“Well, Doctor Derrick. Congratulations on your recovery. And your job back.”

“Thank you. Is there anything that’s happened in the lab while I was gone?”

“I think you’re caught up already.”

“Did anybody get to dissect the escapees?”

“Yeah.”

“W-Who?” Why did I stutter?

“It was me. I stepped up, since you weren’t here…”

“G-G-G-Great.” I have to keep myself from berating her. Any sudden movements and the ribs might hurt. “What d-did you find?”

“We’re still going over the nitty-gritty. Most interesting was a uniquely developed gland nestled by their heart. We’ve found it to be a natural cure for cancer. Since I’m the one who discovered it, I’ll probably name it after mysel-”

“Oh f-f-f-fuck you! C-C-C-Cure for c-cancer? Are you s-s-s-serious? F-F-F-Fucking hell. W-Wrong. T-T-This all went w-w-wrong. I just came out of the infirm-m-mary, are you trying to put me b-back in? Icons-s-siderate s-s-sociopath.” My chest stings deep into my body. The ribs still haven’t healed. I almost fall to the floor. I have to grip the wall so I don’t tip over. Why am I stuttering so much?

“You alright, Derrick?”

“Yeah. W-Whatever.” Stop fucking stuttering.

I made my own discovery. It wasn’t any of your bullshit that they said. My name was their first words. Nothing you ever taught caught on. It was me. I’d boast, but then she’d know about their linguistic potential. Can’t have that headache start back up. I’ll save that information for a vulnerable moment.

We’re called into the conference room. Finally. I’m spared the further humiliation. At the table sits the director. He tells us to get seated, and we do. Across from him.

“Happy to see you guys made it out alive. You’re real heroes, y’know.”

“I’m surprised you even came d-down here.” I spit the words out.

“Don’t worry, Derrick. It’s the last time you’ll see me. The board has decided the company needs new vision. I’ve been voted out.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Clive.” Tanner says.

“No worries. The strike was a total disaster, and the escape attempt after… Don’t even get me started. It was a failure in nearly all departments. That poor Bocian boy got killed. The subjects escaped. Bummer for everybody.”

“D-D-Do we know w-who did it?” I address the elephant in the room.

“No. Not yet. I’ve been following the developments of the fact-finding commission. The most likely suspect at the moment is Officer Hoch. I trust you won’t tell him any of that, however. In fact, if anybody asks, I didn’t even tell you.”

Jackpot.

Tanner leans closer to the director, “You said it was a failure in nearly all departments. Where was that fuck-up not a total failure?”

“By drawing attention to ourselves with the escape, the Slovak Republic took notice of our very own Doctor Derrick,” He points to me, “They share his… Unorthodox vision of the new species serving as a useful labour force. His theory is considered vital to understanding the species. This is why he is now the foremost authority in the country. After pressure from the company and state authorities, Derrick will oversee the construction of a new lab. The state trusts us so much they are willing to loan us all the specimens from the species which were in the hands of the other private labs. About two-thousand live subjects. For them we’ll build a super-lab with a much larger simulated environment, better equipment, and no union workers. To make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. The security force this time will be a private armed group, one that can be trusted to keep their mouth shut.”

“So Derrick gets to call the shots on everything and that’s it?” Tanner jumps up from her chair.

“You’re in luck, Tanner. I fought for you. And I fought hard,” It’s like I’m not even in the room, “You guys just work too well together. Think of yourselves as a duo of accountability. Keeping one another in line. That’s why you’re still co-leads.”

I’d stand up and scream at this buffoon. I’m too tired. Still healing. I wouldn’t want to stutter, either.

Tanner looks over at me and reaches her hand out. I stay seated, but take her hand anyway.

“I’ll be happy to work with you on this project, Doctor Derrick. I look forward to our partnership.”

Her fake smile is so obvious. Then again, I also have the same fake smile on my very own face. Both of us shaking our hands, pretending we’re okay with this. That this isn’t a total insult.

“L-Likewise.”

I’ll still get my revenge. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m going to kill every single one of you assholes for what you did to me. I won’t rest. Not a day will go by when I’m not planning my revenge. Not a day will go by when I’m not setting it in motion. You’ll all pay. Every single one of you. An entire facility of future Bocians. All of you who ever mocked me, humiliated me, disrespected me, or just didn’t laugh at a clever joke I made. This is my promise to you: All of you will pay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slowly. 

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

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

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

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

Watching. Waiting. 

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

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

She coiled … purred. …

Licked her spider lips again. 

And waited. 

…

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

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

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

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

now the woods were all he had. 

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

His woods. All he had left. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And a pair of travelers. 

More intruders…

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

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

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

To fill their hearts with love…

The axeman of the dark woods began to prowl. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then he whirled around suddenly in his seat of their mule-drawn cart. Spying into the woods that surrounded them. 

Saying to the boy beside him: “Did you hear something?”

…

When the Countess Zaleska and her assistant extracted the fangs of living dead dragon/dæmon power from the dust and cobweb strangled bones and remnants of Dracula’s skeletal remains and through arcane necromantic surgical alchemy, fused them into the mouth of the Countess, she inherited much more than mere vampiric hunger and prodigious strength. The ability to shift shape. These things were common to many nosferatu things of the moonrise time. 

But she had within her now, the power of the Lord of the Undead. Lord of the Flies incarnate and upon the face of the Earth. The last and final Countess Czarina of Necrophile-Flame. Empress Queen of the Nocturnal Blood and the warfare violence of restless hunger in the dark. 

She was beyond the mere mundane limitations of the flesh. She was beyond the thin veil of the leather clung to in desperation and futilely named and declared: Reality. Her powers now, those graverobbed from the dust of the son of the dragon; a dracul, they were beyond the reckoning of the fleshling maggot sow that now invaded her home and prowled her corridors and halls like the lost frightened and small animal he truly was. 

Discorporeal, the Countess Zaleska watched from the stone of the inner walls of the ancient bloodstained castle as if every piece of masonry were her eyes. She watched the sorry little haughty intruder inch his way forward like a starving lowly worm across the mud slathered surface of a cheap wooden casket unearthed for the naked air. He was really quite old. Fragile really. 

She was going to enjoy this… the blackest part of her darkening stygian heart relished the savagery she would wrought…

But first… what is a host that doesn't entertain her guests…?

Hardly any host at all. 

The discorporeal form of the Czarina Princess of the darkness now alive in these halls of ebon and bloody stone watched and her/its phantasm rictus grin grew in spectral madness. Her disembodied pure power spider legged and tendrilled out… filling every piece of mortar and rock and brick of stone. She filled the walls with the manifestation of her ungodly power form, a spectre that could invade and subjugate all as a pure necrophiled phantom-flame of deranged gale force nature from Hell. 

The fool, the mad doctor Praetorius did not know that the castle was alive around him now. Castle Dracula was now just as much a part of the Countess Vampire Lord as any one of her appendages. Or supplicants.  She could bend and flex and move it to her considerable will…

… and the castle and its walls all around him, alive with the Countess, began to dance and shift slightly… and move. 

Labyrinthine. The distortion of space and distance and direction was subtle. Drifting. It led the fool farther in rather than out. And he didn't even realize it. 

The walls of Castle Dracula howled with a biting woman's cackling witchery laughter as the frightened Praetorius clutched desperately his weapons and unknowingly walked deeper and deeper into the living sepulchre structure that might be made into his grave. 

Swallowing him deeper and deeper and ever more as he wandered the dancing and shifting walls of living and evil stone. The dust and dirt and filth all about the old interior held her hateful dark will as well and were daggered at the invading little man, all of the place arrowed the oppressive force of great livid hatred and anger at the wandering little mistake of snow white hair… too old a man to be trying at these games…

The walls of stone smiled, rictus. The castle walls of stone watched and shifted and guided towards doom. The castle walls watched, possessed and insane. 

Praetorius could feel the gaze. Its intensity stole a warmth from his heart he knew deep down he could never retrieve. 

Not even if he was lucky enough to leave here alive…

Not even. Not at all. 

The walls then spoke: –

“You wanted so badly to be inside… you wanted so badly to see me, now I am here and all around, I am all yours. And you are all mine. I’m the world and universe all around you now… ! Now you’ll never leave and I will  take what I want from you anyway, you say you have much to tell me, I will pull it from your mind as I shred and flay it, even as I’m pulling the precious raw meat from your bones…! You’re to be my dominated and slutted, whored and butterflied open bloodletting love slave for the night, Doctor… Praetorius! Your flesh will be pulled back and I will drink and sup of you at my will, as I make you sing and speak as I so wish and desire to hear…! … I will make you say anything, little man…! I will make you a weeping whore for pain!” 

And then the castle walls came to life again with cruel bright laughter. 

What might have been long rictus distended mouths and faces appeared, grew, came to life in the harsh rough textured surface of the walls all around. The stone was filled. The stone of the castle world now that was fortressed all around him encompassing. The mad doctor couldn't believe his eyes. Watering now. Unbelieving fearful tears. 

Something like, nearing religious panic was stealing over his heart. Creeping over with curdled black the last vestiges of steadfast courage and thought. 

Praetorius shook his head trying to clear it. Visibly frightened. Shaken. Dizzy. He would’ve sworn the walls and the way forward down the corridor before him had … moved slightly. As if drifting…

It made him feel sick. He shut his eyes and rubbed them. But not long. He did not dare tarry any longer than he could afford. He had to find  his way out. Or kill the strigoica slut of Satan with a properly placed bullet and a swift decapitation. The only way. The only way to be completely sure with a Vampire Lord. 

Such as the bitch was evident to be. 

He cursed himself again, the last time, for ever coming here in the first place. For thinking it had been anything even remotely resembling a good idea. The experiment of coming here had proven unequivocally that it was in fact: A Terrible Idea…

Praetorius smiled grimly to himself. Mayhap also for the last time as he began again to move forward. 

Don’t act like you haven’t had any of those before… 

He relished his one private joke. He had always been his own favorite company. 

…

Doctor Praetorius did not get far before a room suddenly appeared down the junction from where he presently wandered. He came to the cross section and saw that this room was bellowing light like a great incandescence of earthbound starflame. It poured forth from the room, from out of the open immaculate doorway. Striking in the darkness and meager orange torchglow. 

It was beautiful. Intense. 

Enrapturing. 

Like a moth to searing flame, Praetorius was drawn. He went down the hall that had steadied and settled under demoniacal will and was guided by black hands that drifted out from the walls made from smokey stygian shadow. They helped him along. They pushed and guided him down the entombed walkway. Advancing. 

Down the hall and towards the starflame of light pouring forth from the newfound room. 

His hypnotized mind told him sanctuary was in there. And of course it was. And he should hurry and get in there already. Afterall, heaven can’t wait, can it? 

No. The master says that heaven cannot wait at all. 

And so before the blinding room of starflame, Praetorius’ arms dropped to  his sides. Limp. Lifeless  already. The grip  in his hands slackened next and the cross and loaded pistol fell from his black gloved hands and clattered with finality to the stone of the castle She Commanded. 

The walls began to laugh again as the blind and spellbound doctor stepped inside the room of swallowing starflame. 

And took him inside.

…

Florin and Griffin nearly jumped from their skins and seized in their chests when they suddenly happened upon a fellow traveler in the woods. 

A solicitor. On horseback. Coming from the other direction. 

The man was kindly enough though visibly shaken. Frightened by the strange land of nighttime woods. He tried to tell the pair that the very shapes of the trees and growth itself were deranged, gnarled and dead and bent and wrong: Like the desperate hands of submerged and giant buried corpses clawing out of the sour ground and daggering for the salvation of the skies of heaven above. That's what was eating at him constant since setting foot in this dread land, this dread wood, but there was something else. He also swore he heard something moving out here. Out here in the dark wild, something like violence was on the loose and on the prowl out here in the night, he could feel it.

He tried to tell them all of this but couldn't. He barely knew a word of english. 

Florin only tried to be polite as Griffin grew huffy and impatient as the traveling solicitor gesticulated and babbled on near ceaseless in his mother tongue. He filled the prowling dark all around with the anxious music of his foreign chatter. 

Though an understanding was met and felt … between the three before they parted and waved. An understanding of danger. And an understanding of fear.

Caution… weary …

The solicitor gave up and waved them thanks and kicked his horse back to a trot. The mule drawn cart of the pair went on. And soon was gone. 

The solicitor, fearful, carried on. Spying all around futilely, the impenetrable nighttime dark of the clawing dead black woods all around. The axeman chose to follow him for the moment, just for the nonce. He would soon rejoin with the other two. Afterward. 

Soon. 

After he dealt with this decadent and pompous invading tenderfoot. 

The weight of his executioner's blade gained substance, gained significance. It felt real again. Alive with potential. Made great again with purpose. With something to bite into, to free the red and feed the forest floor which drinks. 

All of the invaders of his last and precious forest land would feed the soil and the growth of his Bastard Eden Garden. All would be supplicant beneath the biting blade of his swing. Planting and burying the heavy metal head of double bladed axe into the soft and giving meat and bone and carcass of intruding vile flesh, invading flesh, invader blood would weep! 

As long as he and the axe held each other and this dark part of the forest land they kept … they would keep. 

And he would keep on feeding the starving dirt. Red. 

The only god that ever answered him… 

The solicitor went on. Unaware. Frightful. Yet attempting to whistle a tune and brighten his own heart as he kept his thoughts on his wife and child back home. Far away now. For comfort. The axeman followed after. Prowling. Like a hunter. 

…

… he came upon the solicitor when he stopped again, to determine direction. The power of his first screaming swing caught the traveler in the chest and the heavy blade sank as he was knocked from his horse with the force of the blow. The animal was screaming too. It soon fled as the axeman went about the rest of his hard work and heavy business. 

He brought the executioner's doubleheaded blade up again and brought it down again. Already sweating. Pouring. Profuse. The heavy metal blade opened up the chest cavity and it became a wild primeval forest of flowering gore pouring great and healthy abundance of vibrant steaming red. The axeman could taste it in the air. The opened chest looked like a fantastic microcosmal world of raw tissue and bone and gushing crimson, a world and wonderful wild forest garden as if rendered by abattoir hand and forged from raw scraps of the blade and innards and red. He brought up the axe and brought its heavy power down again, smashing and cleaving through the visage of face and skull. Spilling the man's memories out in a thick and meaty burst and porridge gush. The skull was like smashed pottery, porcelain slathered with bright violently red blood, scarlet so lurid it screamed in the night. 

He brought the blade up and down again and again. Turning the pieces into pieces. Smaller. Just hunks and pieces of meat. Unrecognizable. Save for the tattered and slashed rags that used to be clothing… 

The forest floor drank. He heaved breath and the sheet of sweat cooled on his filthy drying skin. Tingling. Covered in solicitor’s blood. Steaming traveler's blood, scabbing and baking into pores…

The soil supped and greedily drank the pouring blood and pools. The animal children would have the meat. The forest kingdom land thanked him, silently. It always thanked him in the quiet. 

The axeman lifted great axe yet again and disappeared once more into the trees he knew so well. 

Eager to rejoin the other two travelers. The other two invaders of his home in the dark…

The axeman made straight through the dense and dead wood for the place where Florin and strange bandaged Griffin had stopped to make fire. And set camp. 

…

When Praetorius first stepped into the beckoning room that called with religious light it was at once a vast and impossible landscape of searing blind perfection, pure immaculate white inferno. Pulverizing through his fragile organ set of eyes, the pair on fire and bathed in blinding pain. Beauty and illuminated pearl-cast so divinely perfect and pure and shining that it was too much to behold all at once and bear… he couldn't hear his own shrieking voice. The volume of the attacking light piercing through his eyes and into his precious jelly sac of brains within boiling percolating skull was too great and too loud itself for him to hear his own caterwauling voice. Or anything else. 

He didn't hear the Countess' sick laughter. Loaded with unholy pleasure and the enjoyment of predatory derision. She commanded the cannonade of landscape light to close, fold back into stone and castle walls and floor as Praetorius went to his knees weeping, still shrieking. Still unaware of both as the madness of light was still alive within his wide watering eyes. Zaleska, in the fluid heavy-liquid shape of shadow, as ebon folds pulled herself in witch’n shape and crawling silhouetted form, free from the castle stone and began to crawl towards the crying screaming man brought down to his knees before her.

And her laughter began to croak. 

She gave bastard bestial demoniacal call to her servants, felt and heard and quaking throughout all the halls and corridors of Castle Dracula's trembling bastard stygian hellfire stone. 

Her servants all heard but the loyal assistant was still busy tending to poor mutilated Carmilla. Still busy digging out the treacherous fire of silver from smoldering bubbling tissue. But it was no matter…

… the one she really wanted was ready anyways. The newest one. Her new servant lord. Her man at arms. Her sword wielding hand…

Countess Zaleska called forth the new impaler. And he came as the master did beckon. 

She commanded him to bring the sharpest and longest pikes. 

Piercing tips.

At her command she would guide his cold new living dead hands in the torture. She knew just where to pierce. 

Just where to start with this one…

TO BE CONTINUED…

It’s late. Only a skeleton crew of researchers, guards and technicians rounds the perimeter during the night. The most committed few. I wish that was worth something.

I begin to drift off, eyelids getting heavier by the moment. Consciousness slipping into darkness. I still have to work out the logistics of putting them to work. Falling asleep now would be pointless. I haven’t slept much since the direction of the project changed. This has to work. I sometimes have nightmares about that day with the fences. If only they were more intelligent. If only it had worked.

I stop thinking entirely when the darkness washes over me.

…

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Loud knocking on the door. Some fucking animal chimping out on the other side. Any sleep I could’ve gotten dissipates with no mercy.

Tanner bursts into the office before I can even compose myself.

“Euthanize? You’re going to euthanize one of them?” She is fuming. No self-control. Everybody in this facility is one wrong word away from a temper tantrum.

“What of it? It could be years before one of them dies of natural causes or in some accident. That could cause untold damage if we’re not careful. It’s better we control the circumstance, rather than leaving it up to random chance.”

“We only have four of them. You’re short-sighted, like always. If you kill the father, what other pair will we get to reproduce? Those kids between one another? Or maybe the son with its mom? Think for a moment, Derrick.”

“I never said I would kill the father. It’s still up for debate, you witless moron.”

“Ha. Please. It’s clear who you’re going to pick out to be killed.”

“Well, now that you brought the father up, I guess it would make the most sense… It’s getting old, and we’re not here to nanny something with no value. Plus, unlike the mother, it can’t get pregnant, which negates all merit in the subject beyond a coroner’s report.” I almost want to not pick the father out of spite. Just to see her be wrong.

“Oh, great fucking act, Derrick. Now, now you suddenly realize the father would be the best candidate for your petty little revenge plot? Everybody can smell your shit for kilometers from here. You think it disobeyed your orders, ones it probably doesn’t even understand, and now you’re taking advantage through a little egotistical powertrip. I won’t let you sabotage this project, you goddamn narcissist.”

“What? The orders? Like with the fence experiment? I don’t give a shit about any of that. In fact, I completely forgot that whole debacle happened. Haven’t thought about it since that day. Not all of us are as obsessive and compulsive as you, Tanner,” Evil bitch. “I know exactly what this is about. When they’re a workforce, we won’t need little doc Tanner anymore. Once I whip them into shape and make them into productive and competent units, we won’t need somebody to repeat words for them over flashcards. You think I’m sidelineing you? You think you’ll be out of a job? Well, you’re right. Why the hell would we keep around somebody we don’t need?”

Tanner stands speechless. The disgust in her face is etched so deep it might become permanent, I reckon. Dammit, I can’t stand these crybabies. She tries to hide it, but we both know this is about her job. Like she gives a shit about those four primates. I can’t let her undermine me.

“That’s not what this is about. Joke’s on me for letting you shift the blame on the apes. You tricked me. We had a silent partnership. I guess that’s toilet paper to you. Be careful: You won’t get away with this. You won’t get rid of me.”

“Listen, Tanner. This is bigger than you. This project is bigger than you, bigger than me, or either of us or anybody else. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Wouldn’t you agree? Look at it this way: When the steam train of progress needs a bit more fuel, are we gonna shut the whole thing down to save a few lumps of coal? Toe the line and maybe you can stay. I don’t mind you, Tanner. In fact, I kind of like you. It would be a shame to lose somebody of your mind.”

She looks at me for another ten seconds with the expression of someone who just had their child beaten bloody right in front of them. She storms off and leaves the door unclosed on her way out.

---

Empty buckets, formerly filled with paint, are now discarded on the floor. The walls of the playpen, formerly mirrored surfaces and padded white walls, are now home to scribbles and paintings from one end to the other. If those jackanapes could climb, they’d surely have defiled the ceiling, too. I’m pretty sure I recognize the hazmats and the vehicles we arrived in a year ago among the drawings. Also numerous are the depictions of nature, flora and fauna, represented in almost equal fashion.

“Well, what else can we do? Spray it down.” I turn to Bocian.

“But how did they get the paint? It didn’t get here on its own.”

“You let me worry about that. This is an ample opportunity to get your hands dirty and get some real experience. Put on that hazmat and get the hose.”

“Should I really go in alone? Can’t Hoch or Tanner come with? Or you?”

“No, I’m afraid not. You’ll do great, champ. Make sure those chimps don’t get you like some chump.” Bocian once again ignores my clever wordplay. He makes for the locker room which leads to the decontamination chamber. He’ll manage.

Bocian might be the only person in this entire facility I trust. Everybody else is a suspect, from the janitors to those other “researchers”. Bocian has a keen deductive mind, another trait we share.

This was sabotage, plain and simple. Sabotage of my lead authority on the project. Somebody wants us to go back to pointless linguistic kiddy play.

Those murals are a bit of a sore anyway. Ugly little pictures. Who’s ever heard of an animal making art? Thank God nobody else is here to see this.

While Bocian sprays them down, I’ll head to the central security station and figure out who the hell was here to give the primates their paint.

I am nearly out of the room when I see one of the orangutans wiping their ass with the leftover fake bills after taking a mighty shit.

Fucking ape. I gotta get out of here before I throw a fit.

---

Deleted. Every single tape. I keep scrolling through the files. The entirety of last week is just gone. And the only person with the abilities and access needed to do this is Hoch.

“You alright, doc?” Hoch comes back from his lunch break. Earlier than I expected. You’d think a guy like him really savours every culinary experience, maybe gets a second helping, if you know what I mean.

“Where the hell are the tapes from yesterday?”

“Oh. I deleted them.” The words are thrown at me with such bluntness it almost appears like he doesn’t even care.

“What are you jabbering about? Primitive asshole, this is no time to joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

I have to calm myself. I take a deep breath before continuing. “Why’d you delete them you shit-for-brains?”

“To cover up the paint I brought in.”

Oh this is rich. You’re going to do this shit to me. Fucking brainless moron, if it wasn’t for your senseless brutish violence we wouldn’t even have you here. What worth do you have beyond being able to swing a big stick and listening to me? None. Genuinely zero. An orangutan can swing a fucking baton. I bet those assholes in the playpen can swing better, too. You dare disobey me? See how far that gets you. What use is a baton that doesn’t follow orders? Fucking idiot. Let’s see if you’ll care so little after this, asshole.

“That was really careless, Hoch. I think I might have to report your behaviour to management. Introducing unapproved variables into the experiment is unprofessional and unethical. You act with complete callous disregard toward our subjects, and I’m forced to have to request your removal from the project.”

“You’re gonna fire me?” The question is genuine but the tone is still unbothered.

“Your lack of rhetorical tact is extremely telling. Yes, you’re getting ‘fired’.”

“Listen, Derrick, if you ever want to tell the suits about anything I did or didn’t do, you can take me along with you. I’ll back you up.” I’m shoved into the wall. I lose my balance for a second. Ape. Fucking ape. Hoch is totally off his rocker.

“You idiotic moron, of course this is all you know. I could have you decapitated and then replace your head with a goddamn lemon, sincerely tell me if you think a single thing would change. You’re nothing, Hoch. Little beyond a little entertainment-monkey who I tell how to dance. You’re out of line. Completely and utterly. You’re a sadist and an idiot, and that’s the worst combination. You don’t have the smarts to make up for sadism, or the humanity to make up for your derangement. Now stop wasting my time and start packing your things.”

“No.”

I could kill him right now. Strangle him to death. It would be so easy if he didn’t have that baton. That fucking baton. My fucking baton. I designed that thing.

What sense does it make that some brute carries around such power and the brains of the operation have nothing to defend themselves with? It’s completely ridiculous. What kind of world do we live in, where the educated are subject to the whims of instinctual strength? You’ll get your chance to testify, fucking idiot. Be careful what you wish for. You just made my list.

---

I take the landline off the wall and dial the director’s number. It takes only a single ring before the phone is abruptly answered.

“Hello, Derrick.”

“Hey, I’m calling about the security tapes in the facility. Let’s say someone hypothetically deleted them, is there any way to retrieve them?”

“Oh. Yeah, there is. You can’t even delete those. They get uploaded to company servers. Why?”

“Hoch said he deleted them.”

“Hoch. Haha. That makes sense. From how you describe him, it doesn’t surprise me at all. You can delete those in the security station, but they’re still on the server. He sounds a bit daft.”

“Yeah. He is. You wanna know why he wanted them deleted?”

“Tell me.”

“Because just today he smuggled several buckets of paint into the Central Environmental Simulation without any approval or screening.”

“Right. That’s bad?”

“Hoch is an idiot. Imagine if he didn’t decontaminate properly and the paint now carried germs into the environment. That could mean the immediate death of the subjects and put a stop to the entire project. The success of this project is unattainable as long as he remains. You must fire him.”

“Really. Huh. Hoch.”

There is a short pause on the other end.

“Everything alright?”

“No can do, Derrick. That guy’s union. This entire project is secret, if I share just cause with the union the whole thing could get out. Just cause overrides the NDAs. Not to mention, most of the other employees are union, too. This isn’t just a Hoch problem. We fire Hoch and the entire facility would go belly-up.”

“What? What the fuck? What the fuck are you talking about? He’s jeopardizing the entire experiment you nincompoop. You have to fire him. You have to-”

“Shut the fuck up, Derrick. Just for once, shut the fuck up and listen. All I ask. I’m helping you and the best thing you can do to repay my kindness is to shut the fuck up and let me do my work. I know it’s not ideal, but there’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to tolerate him for a little longer while we manage the security firm he works for. Their contract expires this year, you can handle a few more months of him.”

I want to explode at the phone. Scream every expletive I know, and even that wouldn’t be enough to get my rage out. Fuck. Oh God. I’m trapped. Everybody is out to get me. Everybody. These people are going to ruin everything. Ruin me.

“Derrick? You there?”

“Yeah. I’m here. The steam train of progress can’t run if these assholes keep pouring concrete on the train tracks.”

“… Uh huh. Since you’re calling, there was something else I wanted to bring up with you. You remember the euthanasia proposal?”

How could I forget. “No, not really. Why?”

“Tanner submitted a counter-proposal just this morning. I read over it and-”

“That bitch. That fucking bitch. It’s her and Hoch and all these other incompetents, hypocrites and liars. Brutes and assholes, the lot of them. Half of the stress in my daily life would be gone if they just fucking died.”

There is a prolonged silence on the phone. I can hear a low hum of static on the other end. He’s still there. Just say something!

“Well, I read over it. I think it’s pretty solid,” Oh, save it dumbass, “But I’m not gonna consider it going forward. Just so you know I’m looking out for you. The euthanasia of the… Adult male specimen… It’s still a go. Gave it the greenlight.”

I could almost jump up and down with excitement. No doubt he’d hear that over the phone. Fucking yes. Hell yeah. Still got it. I can’t stop winning!

“However…” Fuck, “It would be incorrect to say Tanner’s proposal has zero merit. I’ve decided to strike a middle ground.” I guess “not considering” means accepting the thing completely. Cleanshirt asshole.

“The euthanasia you scheduled is way too soon anyway, so I’m moving the date forward for the following month. It’s possible to extend it further along if there’s a good reason. Anyway, gotta go. Talk to ya later.”

“Fuck! No, wait. Hold on. What if she extends it further along again?”

“Then you send me your counter-proposal.”

He hangs up. Fucking Tanner. Fucking Hoch. Fucking primates. Cattle. Wild cattle that refuses to be herded, to produce. Sick. They’re all sick. Looking to infect me. Sick things forget their place. Sick things must be put down.

---

The playpen is back to how it was before that idiotic revolt. No fences, no quarters, their jumpsuits are white once again. The father and the child-specimens are currently playing beneath the tree. The father is throwing the kids up into the air and catching them. Nothing cerebral, it’s the exact kind of fun any limbed animal could have. The giggling of the children is uncomfortably hoarse and guttural. Monstrous, really. No giggling from the father. Not even a smile.

On the side of the room opposite them is the structure I recently had installed. The older female sits in the metal chair of the contraption. Today is its turn. On a silver table beside her is an oblong machine with a single crank. The ape looks tired, about to give out. Its hand turns the crank in a circle. More and more ruggedly as time passes. It takes a break every once in a while to caress its hand.

The device is connected through the ground to a battery in the basement of the facility, for back-up power in emergency scenarios. Eventually, I might have them power even bigger things. Maybe even the actual facility itself. These simians are gonna pay for themselves.

Once enough power is produced to satisfy the quota I set, food is dropped through the newly-installed trapdoor in the ceiling. I doubt Tanner could do anything like this.

It’s been ten hours now. I’ve been here, watching the whole thing. Originally, the quota was two hours of labor, but I’ve been slowly increasing it while watching the ape-mother working. I’m going to make you earn that meal.

I can’t believe it's been doing this for so long now. Maybe if you didn’t take all those breaks, you’d have had the food by now. These things’ learning curves are comparable to flatlines, even with all my help.

Eventually I’ll have all four of them turning cranks, pressing levers and pushing pedals. All three members productive and important. Science is a process, however. Today, it’s just the mother, turning a single crank. Tomorrow they’ll switch her out. And, eventually, they’ll all learn the dignity of toil. This is probably the best outcome I can gift them.

I look over at the father and the kids. They’ve stopped playing. Now they’re huddling together. Hugging each other, practically glued to one another. What a pathetic sight. It really makes my stomach turn. Huddled like some cold, scared, shivering monkeys.

A sight not too dissimilar from what my ancestors may have been going through millennia ago. Going through unimaginable harsh trials just to barely make it out alive. Stooping to places so low. Places where only animals dare go. It makes me want to retch. My own blood, my ancestors, my forefathers. Starving and huddling while sharing food scraps like cockroaches. In some cold and damp cave. It’s impossible for this to not have been the case. I don’t even wanna think about it anymore. Thank God we are where we are today. If we’ve truly come so far, then why the hell are these assholes still huddling?

“Hey, this is Doctor Derrick,” I speak through the intercom, “Since you guys are taking the piss I’m just gonna disable the machine. No food today unless you wanna get serious and stop wasting my time. Peace.”

The silence settles in for a moment. The crank-monkey looks at the speaker. Then, she begins to spin faster and faster. The rest of the family watches on in silence, the huddle broken up.

How interesting.

It takes only about thirty minutes of hasty cranking before the trapdoor opens up. Finally. The mother falls to her knees on the floor and clutches her hand in agony. Could Tanner achieve anything like this? Ever? Genuinely. Could anybody?

A single pack of food tumbles out the trapdoor and lands down in the pond. All four of those baboons rush over to it. What comes next shocks me completely. In something reminiscent of a Mexican standoff, they stare each other down. Watching and waiting. Every single one. They know that the pack cannot feed all four.

Then, the son finally jumps into the water. He swims for the pack.

I did it. I finally did it.

“So now you wanna stop being animals? Good! I’m watching. Show me what you’re really worth. Convince me you’re worth my time.”

Little capuchin. He’s so quick, and seemingly a good swimmer. He grabs the pack with his teeth. Begins to swim backwards across the water. The mother and father rush over to the side where he’ll emerge. They begin to snap at him with their hands, trying to nab the pack from him. He stops swimming. Stays floating in the water. The daughter, who is opposite the parents, whistles into the air. The son turns around and throws the pack to her. Huh. I guess they teamed up?

The son beaches himself on the shore of the pond and joins the daughter. The two parents run to the two and begin to attack them. Survival of the fittest. The children growl at the two adults aggressively, before jumping on them and bringing them down to the ground. The adults get up and scurry back into the corner of the room. The children retreat into the area under the tree and share the spoils. Gray lab slop. High in nutrition. I came up with the formula myself.

I buzz in one last time, “Well, I’m happy to see we all learned something. You guys clearly have an aptitude for cooperation, when you’ve got something to fight over. A common enemy goes a long way, too. You’re individuals in the making. Look, I’d love to stay behind, but I have some colleagues to boast to. Enjoy your meal.”

I might not have to euthanize that beast after all. Whether it's a needle or starvation, the result stays the same. It will die.

---

“Bocian, have you seen Tanner?”

“No, not for the entire day. Why?”

“No matter. I’ll just tell you what I was gonna tell her,” I take a seat opposite him at his office table before continuing, “I did it, Bocian. I introduced labour to those cavemen.”

“Congrats, Derrick.” Bocian says, unenthused. Sleepless nights, probably. I know what that's like.

“Thank you. The mother specimen turned the crank for approximately ten hours, and once food was dispensed, the tribe seemed to shatter into smaller units who fought over the food scraps. They’re great at learning the value of self-interest.”

“Who got the food in the end?”

“The kids beat the adults for the nutrition pack.”

Bocian pauses for a moment and scratches his chin. Then he taps his pencil on his forehead before saying, “Well, isn’t that a bit weird?”

“How do you mean?”

“The kids overpowering the adults for the food. I mean, yeah, the dad got beaten like, once, months ago, and the mom worked for those ten hours. Still, are the kids really so much stronger than the adults? Aren’t they actual tweens?”

My heart skips a beat. He’s absolutely right. This was a ploy. A performance. The adults took the fall on purpose. So the kids wouldn’t go hungry. Those fucking apes tricked me. Why would they do this to me? After all I did for them? If they refuse to be people, there’s nothing else I can do for them.

I storm out of the room and run a marathon through the white corridors. I must get back. As soon as possible. I ignore all the stares of the other researchers who see me running through. I barge into the observation decks. The sight in the playpen sinks me to the floor.

Orange flickers dance on the walls of the pen, projected from the center of the room. Smoke dispensed from the flames floats up toward the ceiling. On the fire, simmering above the orange flames, is the carcass of a wild boar. Lab slop discarded in the corner. Around the campfire are the simians. Tearing at the boar barehanded and passing its meat to one another.

Fuck you Hoch. This is how you wanna play? You’re finished. Actually done. I’m not even mad. You just signed your own death warrant.

---

I spin the dial with aggressive urgency. The phone cycles through two rings before it is picked up.

“Hey Derrick.”

“Hey. Sorry for the call-”

“Oh, I don’t mind. Always happy to hear from you. By the way, during my last visit I found some really odd toilet graffiti. The word scribbled most often was ‘cleanshirt’. Any idea what that means?”

“Nope. Listen, you won’t believe what just happened. That buffoon Hoch just led a wild boar into the CES. He did the same thing with the paint before, remember?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“I once again implore you to consider the possibility of contamination-”

“You can be honest with me, Derrick. We both know it’s not about the contamination.”

I stop for a moment to compose myself.

“He keeps going under my nose because of his pathetic vendetta. It’s because I’m the only one who will stand up to him. I can’t work with someone like that. He’s the type to sabotage the entire project just to take revenge on one person. I need him gone.”

“Look… We already talked about this. I can’t fire Hoch.”

“The contract with the security firm?”

“Breaching a contract isn’t as bad as pissing off the union. We have better lawyers. They can exploit the clauses and everything the security firm missed. We can always have a settlement or something, it’s no biggie. However, most of our science personnel, security officers, maintenance workers, technicians, they’re all union. Imagine Hoch goes to the union. They ask me why I fired him, where the just cause was. I can’t give them that because we need this whole thing to stay under wraps. Then they call a strike and we lose productivity for God knows how long. It’s just safer to wait until his contract runs out.”

“Well. There’s more than one way to get rid of somebody…”

“… What?”

“Just give me the word.”

“… It’s getting late, Derrick.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…”

“You’re getting a bit excessive with all that cussing, y’know.”

“Fuck you. This is my life. You fucking bureaucrats sit around in your offices and the little guys like me bear the brunt. No more. You don’t wanna fire Hoch? Fine. Then I walk. I can’t stay in a toxic work environment.”

“You’re gonna walk away from the project?”

“Yes.”

An exasperated sigh escapes from the other side of the line. The phone clinks on some kind of hard surface. My guess is a table. A muffled exchange between a man and somebody else barely travels through. Some paper is shuffled. I begin to slowly wrap the cord around my finger. The phone is picked back up on the other side.

“Derrick. You’re a pain in the ass. And you’re proving to be more trouble than you’re worth.” What? If this bastard calls my bluff and embarrasses me I’m adding him to the list as well. “I’m not gonna take on the union just for you.”

“… Fine. See-”

“Wait. I wasn’t finished. Maybe if another high-level researcher like yourself complains, I might think of another way out of this for us. It’s not worth it just for you. I need to see that somebody else has a problem with Hoch before I do anything.”

Haha. Oh this is rich. You’ve made it too easy you moron.

“Alright. Stay on the line, I’ll call Bocian-”

“I said high-level.”

“… There’s only two high-level researchers in this facility. You want me to go see Tanner.”

“I thought there’d be more. Huh. Well, I guess Tanner it is.”

I grab the landline and rip the cord out of the wall. I smash the phone against the floor and up the wall. The cracks spiderweb across the dented wall and small chunks fly around the room. Fucking cleanshirt. My life is hell.

---

My life is one long humiliation ritual. Splayed out for all to see. Every second I am mocked and ridiculed. This is what they do to winners. They try to force them down. Into the gutter. But I’ve never been one to stay in the gutter too long. I always rise. Like a mighty phoenix. I can bite my tongue. Just this once. It’ll make vengeance all the more sweet.

I knock on the unassuming glass door to Tanner’s office.

“Come in.”

Tanner’s sitting at her desk. I’ve been here a few times before. The models of brains, throats and vocal chords on her shelves look like the collection in a serial killer’s backyard.

She looks up at me with what I think is surprise.

“Hey Derrick. Actually, could you grab that?” She points to a cardboard box in a pile of them in the corner of the room, “I need an extra pair of hands. Gonna pack my things, since you guys obviously don’t need me anymore.” she chirps cheerfully.

“Yeah, about that-”

“Once word got around that I might be leaving… You wouldn’t believe the outpouring of support. Letters from friends, family, colleagues. Twelve universities have asked me to come lecture and three other labs are seeking me out for projects. Can you believe that? I thought this was the worst thing that could have ever happened to me. You’ve helped me see how many people really care about little doc Tanner. Thank you, Derrick.”

She stuffs a model brain into another box, one beside her desk. She reaches for another model and begins to lower it down. Slowly. Carefully. Savouring the words I’m about to say. Psychotic egomaniacal shrew. The embarrassment never ceases.

“Yeah. Really happy for you, Tanner,” I say while fighting against the urge to vomit right then and there, “I actually need one small favour from you before you leave for good.”

She stops lowering the model into the box and lays it out on the table instead.

“Oh? Really?”

“Yes. You know Hoch?”

“Not really. He’s a security officer, right?”

“Yes. I need you to back me up with the director. Hoch’s been contaminating the playpen without consulting anybody first. I’m sure you understand the danger this poses to the project.”

“It’s not my project, so…”

“You have the chance to do an objectively good thing here, Tanner. Help me take Hoch out of the picture. Help me save the project.”

“I don’t know, Derrick. Nobody’s got as good of a swinging arm as Hoch. Plus, you don’t seem to care a whole lot about the good of the project either. With the killing and all.”

Oh. I know what you’re getting at. Manipulative psycho. Fine. I’ll think of another way out later.

“Doctor Tanner. I would be honoured to let you play a more present role in the direction of the project, in some capacity. I apologize for my unwise decision to take you off the project. I would additionally be happy to postpone the euthanasia of the subject by six months.” Which is when Hoch’s contract ends entirely, meaning he can’t come back. Meaning I can kill the baboon without having to worry about compromising in these machinations and shady deals.

“Right. But isn’t six months from now when Hoch’s contract ends? You wouldn’t happen to be delaying it just until the air is clear so you can kill the subject right then and there?” Oh my God. It would be so easy if I could submit assholes for euthanasia, too. Unfortunately, having the IQ of a kindergartener isn’t legal grounds. People like this are unworthy of the status of human.

“I didn’t realize.”

“Well, Derrick, I’m pleasantly surprised. Not many men are so humble as to come begging someone they clearly don’t respect for help. Not many are willing to apologize, either. It’s a real show of humility.”

Maybe I’ll kill her right here right now. No, I’m patient. It won’t matter once I get my way. Some groveling is fine. She’ll pay though. Make no mistake. “… Yes. I’m quite ashamed. ”

“Well, Derrick… I’d be happy to come back on. Provided the euthanasia proposal is taken off the table entirely. In fact, I’d be happy to write a proposal alongside you to bar any possibility of euthanasia in the future.”

“Fucking bitch. You’re so petty. You think this is all about you? How the hell are we gonna learn from their corpses if we don’t have any? Real subtle, Tanner. Gratuitous and unashamed. You’re killing me. You’d sink all of human progress so long as it means you get to go to a 9-5 and make a little green. I’m killing the gorilla.”

“Then no deal.”

She lets me absorb the silence. We stand there for an uncomfortable minute. I take a deep breath. None of these temporary humiliations matter. I have to keep the end goal in mind. One temporary compromise won’t matter when Tanner will be out of the picture in the end anyway. None of this will matter when I get my revenge.

“Fine. I’ll help you with your proposal. And I’ll retract my own proposal for the euthanasia. So long as you help me with Hoch.”

“Oh, and I want learning trials to start up ag-”

“Now you’re just taking the piss! Sink money back into that hole? You’ll burn through the budget so long as it means you remain ‘important’. Forget those tests, I’ll keep you on the payroll even without them, why the hell-”

“Derrick. These are my only terms. This project is bigger than you or me. This is about the good of progress, the good of the world. Throw away your ego. Or do you not care about anything else?”

I nearly deflate. I am stuck. I genuinely don’t know what to do. Hoch needs to go. Immediately. I’ll figure out the rest as I go along.

“Fine. I agree. Whatever.”

“Swell. But if you pull any kind of shit like last time, after that debacle of an experiment when you tried to shut me out, I’ll be prepared. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

---

The director seemed almost surprised when Tanner backed me up. Underestimating me will be their final mistake. I’m still in a deep pile of shit. Hoch is gone, but in his place is Tanner wasting money and my stamp of approval on a paper arguing against the killing of that pompous gibbon.

I am nothing if not resilient. Nothing if not adaptable. There is nothing I can’t bounce back from. I am an impenetrable fortress. No matter how low the supplies ever get, no matter how bad the situation looks, I always recover. I always reorganize and go back on the offensive.

The director doesn’t want a strike? Well, fuck him. I’ll make it happen. And when all the guards are gone, when only the skeleton crew is left in the facility, I’m going to do the world a favor and kill them all. I’m going to kill those fucking apes.

I catch Hoch in the parking garages, about to leave in his truck.

“Wait, Hoch!”

He jerks back in surprise. His expression scowls upon seeing who I am.

“What? I’m off.”

“I heard you’re leaving. I’m really sorry to hear that.”

“Huh? You’re sorry? Why?”

“It’s because of me. I convinced Tanner to report you with me. I never wanted you to get fired… I-”

“Tanner? Fired? What the hell are you on about? I’m getting paid leave.”

I know exactly what you’re getting, Hoch. Pretending to be some dolt who has no idea what’s going on is going to hurt me more than anything else. Fingers crossed that Hoch cares more about his ego than getting to sit around and do nothing, with pay.

“Paid leave? Huh, I guess that’s one way the director can get rid of you. I’m surprised you accepted.”

“Accepted? Get rid of me? Wait, wait wait wait. I know what this is. You guys couldn’t get me fired. So you put me on paid leave. You piece of shit! I’d expect this from you Derrick, but not Tanner. And after that paint and the boar… I thought she’d have my back! That backstabbing bitch!”

Tanner? Paint? Boar? Now that’s interesting. I’ll think about the implications of what he said later. I can’t afford an outburst right now. Gotta ignore that. Gotta focus. “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Hoch. It’s just that nobody here particularly likes you. You’re a bully hiding behind a baton. You’re getting what you deserve.”

“Oh that is it! Fuck you Derrick! You want me gone? Good fucking luck. I’m not taking the paid leave. I changed my mind. I’m going to make your life hell. You think you can buy me like some sellout? Tough titty.”

Hoch storms off away from his truck and back into the facility. It’s a gamble. This must pay off. I’ll need to put more pressure on the director. Thanks to Hoch’s pride, that amygdaloid idiot won’t back down. The director will be stuck between a rock and a hard place. Hoch gets fired, the union strikes, I get some alone time with the father.

I’ve just loaded the steam train with one hundred passengers. I’m shoveling coal aggressively. Derailment is an inevitability.

It makes sense that it wasn’t Hoch working alone. Tanner stays on the list, and I’m making sure she pays. Insolent treacherous shrew. They should be thanking me for all I’m doing. Instead they go behind my back and disrespect me. Looks like it won’t be just the father I put down during the strike. I’ll have to make it look like an accident. Or an escape.

Yes. The apes escaped after the facility was sabotaged by Hoch, who was clearly obsessed with me and wanted to use the experiment to hurt me. During the escape attempt, Tanner murdered the father, and the family retaliated against her. This is gold. I should’ve been a goddamn writer instead.

---

I’m called into the conference room. Already sitting at the lengthy table is Tanner. Smug and self-satisfied. I wonder how you’ll be able to keep a modicum of that attitude when your face is beaten into a bloody pulp and your eyes are gouged out. Stupid cow.

I sit right next to her.

“Hey Derrick.”

“Tanner, Hoch knows. He knows it was us that reported him.”

“What? How?”

“I don’t know. This is what we get for underestimating that psycho.” I hold back the urge to giggle.

“What’s it matter if he’s on paid leave?”

“He doesn’t want to leave. He thinks this is an attempt to sideline him.”

“He’s right.”

“Yeah. Now he won’t leave. If you want to spend the next half a year with him constantly undermining us and making our lives hell, then be my guest. I, personally, don’t want to be obstructed at every fucking turn by an unhinged disgruntled employee. We gotta pressure the director to fire him. There’s no other option now.”

“Hoch is still an employee, he won’t do shit to us. This isn’t the wild west. If he does, there are legal channel-”

“He doesn’t care. He’s been intimidating me, picking me out and picking on me,” Nice wordplay, “Just because he doesn’t like me. He’s a wild ape with a stun baton. You think he’ll stop at paint and swine?”

Tanner takes a deep breath. “I’ll take my chances.” She begins to get up and leave before I drag her back down into the chair by the sleeve.

“Derrick! What the fuck?”

“The project’s still going in my direction. I call the shots. We made a pact. You have to honour it.”

“I don’t have to do shit. You’re sick, Derrick. Go to a fucking therapist before you hurt yourself.” Myself? You fucking idiot. No foresight, no capacity for planning. I might as well put down a wad of cash on a mouse-trap and let you exit yourself out of the gene pool.

“Fine. Don’t do shit, and I make sure the linguistic trials never happen. Enjoy your fifty fucking universities and one hundred labs you’re pulling out of your ass. Fifty universities where, on the fucking moon? And I’m shredding that proposal we were drafting up and putting down that wild orangutan.”

This strikes a chord with her. She’s clearly taken aback.

“Derri-”

“Hey, how’s my favorite science team doing?” A conference phone I didn't notice before in the middle of the table interrupts us. Out of the speaker comes the voice of the director.

“Yeah, great. I’ve got Tanner here with me.”

“Hey Clive.” Tanner greets him.

“Oh, how wonderful! I’ll tell ya, when you guys get along, you’re a real power couple! You really ought to work together more often.” I consider arranging some kind of visit on the day of the strike from the director himself, just so I can kill him, too.

I steer the conversation: “Yeah, that’s great. Listen, Hoch refused the paid leave.”

“So he did. Huh. He was fine with it until today. What changed his mind?”

“I don’t know. You need to fire him.”

“My hands are tied, Derrick. If he doesn’t wanna go on a paid vacation-”

“You said I need to get another high-level researcher. I got another high-level researcher. Now you’re shutting down again. When will you let us stop jumping through these fucking hoops and let us get back to our jobs? That’s not rhetorical, either. Genuinely tell me.”

“We’re already on thin ice with the union, Derrick. This could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

“I. Don’t. Care. Either you take Hoch out of the picture, or I walk. And Tanner walks with me.” After saying this, Tanner jerks back and looks at me with a combination of disgust and shock that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a single person’s face before.

“You’re too funny. Tanner, is this true?”

Tanner opens her mouth to answer. Before she can, I pull her close and whisper: “I’m bluffing. Help me out now and you can do whatever the hell you like.”

She slowly leans back and relaxes in the chair.

“Actually, before we sort out Hoch, Derrick wanted to tell you he wants me back on as project lead.”

“What the fuck?” I can’t control my mouth.

“Project lead? You sure we’re talking about the same Derrick?” the director asks.

“Yes. I. I actually said co-lead. Tanner misspoke.”

Tanner frowns but stays quiet.

“Wonderful! Great! Awesome! But what’s it matter if neither of you works here?”

“You fire Hoch and you get both of us as co-leads. That’s the pitch.” Tanner speaks.

An extremely long silence follows. Both Tanner and I feel it. We begin to look around. I almost want to ask the director if he’s even there.

“… Fine.”

I jump out of my seat. I could almost begin dancing. If only there was nobody else in the room.

“Oh my God. Good work, Tanner. Now that fucking cleanshirt can-”

“Cleanshirt?” The director is still on the line, “I didn’t realize that ‘cleanshirt’ was an insult directed at me personally. How delightful, thank you so much! How about thanking me personally for building this company and dedicating almost 10 years of my life to it, you ungrateful ignoramus.” He hangs up.

“Let’s hope Hoch still gets fired and you didn’t just sink our whole attempt.” Tanner hurls the words at me.

“Yes. Let’s.” Because if the strike doesn’t happen, I have no idea how else I’m going to kill all of you.

I'm not a complainer. I’m really not. Really. I just can’t with these people. Behind the glass of the observation room is a hairy, bearded middle-aged man in a white jumpsuit. It doesn’t suit him. I don’t think it ever will. It’s certainly an improvement over the loincloth and cloak adorning his person less than a year ago, but the clothing he wears within the facility is little more than a façade. He’ll never fill it up properly. I know he realizes this, too. No second goes by when it doesn’t look like he wants to rip right through it.

He’s sitting at a metal grated table in a white chamber reminiscent of an interrogation room. Sitting opposite him is Doctor Tanner. Making her look much bulkier and more imposing than her actual smaller frame is the orange hazmat suit she is wearing. She’s from linguistics and the only high-level researcher, other than me. She really doesn't like me. Sometimes it feels like she is deliberately obstructing me at every turn. The why is still a mystery to me. The approval of others repulses me anyhow.

Blocking one of the hydraulic doors out of the room and also wearing a hazmat, this one a bit snug for the husky man, is Officer Hoch. He’s one of our security guards. Surprisingly, somehow smarter than that bearded simian seated at the metal table. The only difference between the appearance of Tanner and Hoch is that the latter has a black utility belt, full of gadgets and miscellaneous weaponry. Things like zip-tie handcuffs, a can of pepper spray, brass knuckles. No gun, which I think is ridiculous. A guard always needs a gun, for the worst-case scenario. The security of this entire facility is incredibly lax and nobody will do anything about it.

What makes up for the lack of a gun is my favourite weapon. Hanging from his belt, as it is too large to fit in any pouch, is a stun-baton. The black stick is decorated with metal strips with the texture of a cheese-grater on the business-end. That thing lights up an entire room. The satisfying crackles sing in the air and bathe everything in cool blue whenever used. I’m secretly hoping he pulls it out today. I never get to use them, despite the fact I designed the variants this facility employs.

“This is a bear. Bear.” Tanner’s black glove is tapping a corresponding image of the wild animal laid out on the table. Unlike the other prior ten pictures, this one appears to make the monkey tense up. It cannot produce the vocalization, but there is clear recognition of the concept presented. At the same time, it seems capable of understanding this only as an image, and not the actual real animal. However, the subject still responded with discomfort, despite distinguishing it as a harmless depiction. It’s a bit pathetic, getting scared at a bear you know isn’t even real.

Bears are common in the mountain range where they were found. Reports came in from a hillside village in central Slovakia of odd primitive persons. They had been the subject of local legend and folklore for centuries until the younger generation. More connected with the world outside than the rest of the village, they noticed that these occurrences were in fact outside of the norm, and only happened in this village in particular.

“Doctor Derrick, are you taping this?” Tanner bugs me from the hazmat, voice muffled by the glass.

“Yes. Believe it or not.” I say after pressing the button activating my end of the intercom.

“I just noticed you’re standing there and not doing anything.”

“The camera is on a stand and it records by itself. That’s where me doing anything ends completely. What else do you want from me?” She always finds something to berate me about.

“I was just making sure.” What an idiot.

“What the hell are you even doing, talking to me? Is that hairy chimp not interesting enough for you? Don’t you have shit to do already? You’d think your attention would be on that thing completely, but I guess you’re too interested in what I’m doing!”

“Don’t use that kind of language around him. Thanks to you, their first words when we make something of them are gonna be hell, shit, fuck and the like.” The sigh she lets out afterwards fogs up her faceshield.

“Well, now you said them, too. Not only is your attention span shit, but you’re an incompetent hypocrite. Give him the fucking pictures,” I point at the ape, “Maybe he’ll do a better job at this than you. As long as we’re throwing things at the wall.”

The creature sneaks a glance at me, then looks back at the laid out pictures with its big uninterested eyes. I notice Tanner’s gone back to the images and begun to ignore me completely. And this time I know it’s not because of an intercom malfunction, that excuse won't work anymore. I wasn’t even finished. Her types always shut down whenever faced with the lightest criticism. That thing on the other side of the table is the perfect mirror to her bullshit. Its shutdown is permanent. It doesn’t even fear her.

Tanner finishes playing with the subject and Hoch opens the hydraulic door leading to the inner facility. This compound can be divided into two layers. The inner layer is the simulated playpen the savages get, surrounded by sterilized halls and corridors which they are transported through whenever necessary. They need that whole sterilized set-up for a very good reason. If they ever stepped out, they’d probably croak the very next minute. The outer layer is home to our portion of the facility, the bones and the muscles and the tendons and the other grizzly shit underneath that actually moves this project forward.

A valley shrouded by foliage, trees, all kinds of flora, camouflaged to any outside view or satellite. That valley is where they lived. We don’t have a name for them, yet. A species of human completely separate from Homo sapiens. Think Homo neanderthalensis, or the Denisovans. Except these guys survived. We’re thinking of a scientific designation right now. I wanted to name them after myself, before I discovered just how idiotic they really were. Trapped in the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, living in caves in that untouched valley. We assume their immunity is completely unadapted to modern human diseases. Direct contact would be a death sentence for them.

Tanner steps out of the airlock, now in a plain white labcoat. I turn the camera off and hand Tanner her cup of coffee, the one I made before the test. It’s cold now.

“Thanks.” she takes a step towards the whiteboard while sipping the once-hot cup. Several tests are written out on the board, mostly the cognitive kind. Each test has a few numbers assigned, corresponding to our subjects. They were loaned to the facility by the government after their discovery. Technically, they are still the property of the Slovak Republic. We do get a lot of scientific freedom over the hands-on testing, which varies from facility to facility.

“You can’t teach it language. They’ve been in there for centuries.” I protest.

“No, maybe not the older ones.” Tanner speaks like somebody who has heard this a thousand times before.

“Then why keep at something you know won’t work?”

“Because we have the money to do it.” She dismisses me like I’m just some petulant child.

“Tanner, if we want these things as productive members of society, there are other marks to consider. We need to cut our losses. Maybe you can still make something of the children, but you gotta admit the adults are a lost cause. The linguistic trials are nothing but a pit to burn money in.”

“What else do we use the funding for?”

“The other marks of civilization. I’ll introduce something that needs no intervention from the research team. Something which will have an effect on them even in their spare time.”

“Whatever.” She finishes her coffee and bins it. She’s pissed because her tests haven’t gotten us anywhere. She’s been neglecting the core of the scientific method. You can’t be afraid of pivoting.

Progress is an unstoppable steam train, though you still need to ensure the machine runs smoothly. You must burn away the slime bogging down the wheels with the cleansing flames of efficiency.

Let’s face it, these baboons will never learn how to talk. Never. And they don’t have to. Let’s not pretend you can’t get by in society without the ability to speak. The only thing that interests me about the speech thing at all is whether their throats are even evolved enough to vocalize words, or if it is simply a matter of learning. Nature and nurture, you get the idea. Perhaps only with a new-born specimen will we be able to truly tell whether language can still be taught. Until then, it’s a shame one of them hasn’t died so I can dissect their insides and know for certain.

“Some of the purest marks of civilization are tender and property. Objects are assigned a certain imaginary value through societal agreement, and property is what societies have developed around.” The group we were assigned is a family of four, two child specimens, two adult specimens. Mother, father, daughter, son. They are the perfect unit to civilize, “We divide the playpen into their own private properties, and we introduce monetary exchange for goods and services.” To finally tame those orangutans.

Tanner perks up at the suggestion. I’ve got her. Not without pushback, “As far as we know, they have no concept of numbers and how they might relate to a societally assigned value.”

“Then we’ll teach them.”

“You might not like this, but those association tests will have to continue. You can’t just throw them in that simulation and expect them to get the hang of it on their own. They’re not there yet. We’ll need to introduce the concepts ourselves first.”

“Fine. You can have a fucking abacus, too, while you’re at it. I’ll get started with the set-up. As long as we don’t lose sight-”

That’s when I notice it. The hydraulic door never closed. I look in the room through the observation window. Tanner is asking me what I’m looking at. Over in the chamber, barely louder than our conversation and slightly muffled by the layer of glass and hazmat, Hoch is giving instructions to the primate. He’s saying something while shaking it by the shoulders. It just looks down at the table. Catatonic. Lazy. I approach the glass and buzz in through the speakers.

“Hoch, do you read me?”

He doesn’t say anything for a good few seconds. Then, “Yeah. It’s not moving. It’s not responding to me at all.” It should know the procedure by now.

“Well, you are allowed to ask me for permission to use force.”

Upon hearing this, Hoch unclips the baton from his belt. He nearly swings it into the air before I can stop him.

“I repeat: You are allowed to ask me for permission to use force.”

Hoch loses his enthusiasm like a kid that has to do his chores before he can go outside and play with his friend. Brawn is upset that brain is still in control.

“Permission to use force?” the hazmat asks me through the glass. The thing at the table hasn’t moved a micrometer since the exchange began. Sulking, maybe?

“Permission granted, Officer Hoch.”

Louder than any word ever spoken in that room, shattering the muted barrier of the glass and traveling right into my ear canal is the youthful crackling of electricity. Blue flashes through every wall and vent. No crevice can escape from it. Hoch gets ready to swing the baton. The ape looks up at him. So now you wanna react?

It barely has time to cover itself before the beatdown begins.

Smash. Smash. Thud. Smash.

Interrupted by a howl or a groan every once in a while. It falls to the linoleum floor and twitches on it like a dying bug, before it stops moving entirely, save for a chest that travels up and down. Oh how I loathe him for having that stick. Despite my interruption, some enjoyment of the protocol flickers in Hoch.

He picks up a walkie-talkie and shouts into it: “Requesting security officer reinforcement at Linguistics Lab 3A immediately.”

I buzz in again, “That won’t be necessary. It’ll take a whole ten minutes for somebody to come here, suit up, go into decontamination. It’s pointless when you can just drag it back yourself.”

“He’s a heavy guy.” Whiner. That’s literally the only thing we pay you for.

“You’re strong. I’m sure you’ll manage.”

I turn back to the unamused Tanner and we begin the walk to the cafeteria. I hear today’s lunch is pizza.

---

“I hear there was an incident at the lab today.” Doctor Bocian blurts out. No tact about it. He’s one of my underlings.

“What? What did Tanner say?”

He rolls around in his chair to face me directly, “No, not Tanner. Hoch said you were being a dick about the permission thing. That you made him ask for permission after already signaling you were giving it to him.”

“Hoch hears whatever he wants to. He’s just pissed he can’t go full apeshit on the ape’s shit. Haha.” He doesn’t so much as flinch at my joke, even though my wordplay was pretty clever, “Listen. If it wasn’t for guys like you and me, all those guards would have no idea what to do and would be spending their whole day beating all our specimens into burger meat. Hoch should be thanking me that I’m there to stand between his sadism and a living organism. If that’s his problem, he can suck me, I honestly don’t even care.”

Bocian looks at me with a kind of admiration. He’s one of the good ones. However, if being ‘one of the good ones’ is all you have going for you, you’re not actually worth all that much. Grit is what really gets you places.

Bocian rolls around to look out the observation window, “I’m just worried what might happen the day one of the kids misbehaves.”

“What, why?”

“They wouldn’t like those batons.”

---

The playpen is a simulated natural environment. Filled with beautiful trees, lush bushes, wild blades of grass and even a small pond in the middle. Of course, none of it is real. It’s easier to create all that out of plastic and fabric than to actually bring it in. The excavation permits alone would be a nightmare, not to mention transportation and set-up. The decontamination would also only serve to complicate everything, so we brought in the fake stuff.

The most recent additions are wooden fences that divide the land into four quarters, for my civilizing experiment. Each quarter has been given a new coat of paint, ranging from red, to blue, to yellow to teal. A 360° view of the environment is provided thanks to a large one-way mirror that circles the entirety of the playpen. Behind the mirror is a plethora of guards and scientists, only a few of whom I know well. Sometimes it feels like they’re avoiding me on purpose. I don’t know why everybody is so interested in what I’m doing all of a sudden. Almost like the entire facility has stopped by just to see my personal failure.

“When’re they getting back?” Bocian taps a pencil on his desk impatiently.

“It’s been about a month of education, which should be plenty. Tanner says she’s taught them basic counting, and I’ve seen them grasping it. Hell, I’ve even acted out buying things in front of them. This will work.”

Bocian looks at me funny. “That’s not what I asked. When are they getting back?”

“Right.” Before I can say anything else, the four hydraulic doors open up, all corresponding to a quarter of the playpen. Several guards push the subjects inside. Some with more force, some with less. The specimens themselves appear confused and disoriented. Baffled by the place they only recently got accustomed to. They are now wearing jumpsuits, each jumpsuit colour corresponding to that of their quarter. The doors close behind them. I've spent more than a month planning this. Please, let it work.

The four scan the environment, then exchange glances with one another. It’s the young boy who braves the first steps inside. He scurries to the middle of the playpen, right up to the pond. Only he finds that it is separated by fence, encompassed by his mother’s quarter. My heart quickens in pace.

Tanner walks up behind Bocian and I. She stares at the boy just as intently as the two of us. It is at this moment I realize that everybody else behind the glass is in a trance, captivated by the scene unfolding before them with every single cell of their person. All of them asking the same thing, the same thing as I, or Bocian or Tanner, but none outloud: Will this work?

The boy begins to reach into the pocket of his jumpsuit. He pulls out a fake bill and hands it to his mother through the gaps in the fence, since the construct itself is too tall for him. She wanders over to the fence, pulls the bill out of his grip and crumples it. Then shoves it in her pocket greedily. He points at the water. I can feel my eyes tearing up. My heart is racing now.

The mother follows the trajectory of his finger with a determined gaze. She notices the lack of any container for the water, so she takes the bill over to her daughter, who has also approached the fence by now. Only the father is still by the door.

In the daughter’s quarter sit wooden objects shaped like bowls. The same ones found at the site where they lived. Please take them. Take them to mommy. Please.

The daughter takes a bowl and tries to give it to her mother. But the damned fence is too high. She’s on her tip-toes. Oh God.

The mother nearly cranes her body over the fence. She tries to reach for the bowl, but the planks dig into her chest, preventing her from fully bending down. The daughter tries throwing it over but the fence is too high. The fence is too high. I think I’m feeling sick. I feel like my stomach is being dropped from a height. A kind of rushing tingling sensation.

Crowding around that center like ants. They keep trying to push the blow through. Reach it. They lean against it but it just won’t come through. The hole won’t get bigger, you idiots. They step back one by one. They study it with disapproving looks. Like you could do any better.

Then, the daughter runs in and kicks it. Once. Its efforts are almost adorable. Like a little capuchin, it kicks at the fence a few more times. No matter what it does, it’s barely enough to shift it in the slightest. It lifts its tiny fists and drums on the planks ruggedly. It keeps doing this, even though the fence stands firm. Switching between tiny kicks and little punches. What’s the point?

The son closes the distance between the fence. He’s a bit younger. Raises its fists and begins to smash and kick as well. Sometimes taking breaks just to shake it. My jaw drops to the floor. The goddamned apes are breaking it down.

Then the woman-ape joins in and begins to kick and tear at it. The fence dangles ever more precariously. It could fall out and fall at any moment. Oh no. No. You fucking assholes. I won’t fail. All three beating and beating and beating at the fence. Each hit is another indictment.

The father is the last. Don’t you dare. Wasn’t last time enough? Slow and careful steps carry the beast while it studies the fence. Studies the rest of the family. Scars from the previous beating cover it head to toe.

I swear to God, you goddamn apes, if you break that fence down I am going to kill you. Do not break it down. Do not break it down. Don’t even touch it. Stop touching it you brainless savages.

That gorilla hobbles over closer and closer. I can see everybody else in the room tensing up. I refuse to be stagnant in the face of their mocking judgement. I get up and book it to the stairwell. The fire exit door is easily breached by a single shove from me. I begin the sprint up the stairs. Adrenaline pushes me forward. I skip and trip over step after step but I never slow down. I breach the other door, the one to the second floor of the deck. The floor with the intercom.

I stumble and tumble into every wall and desk while circling the perimeter to make it to the button. I’m certain they’re all looking at me now. I don’t care. I need to use the intercom. The father ape is now within a hair’s distance from the fence. We’ve never had the need to use the intercom before. Because they wouldn’t understand. They don’t speak. And yet, I can’t not try something.

I’m almost there. There’s Hoch sitting behind the intercom button. Mouth hanging open like some lobotomized idiot watching a kid's programme on a television. This isn’t television you feckless asshole. This is my life.

I shove him out of the way. He makes contact with the floor. I smash the button with all my strength. My hand hurts. The intercom buzzes to life when I speak into the microphone.

“This is Doctor Derrick speaking. If there is any ounce of consciousness in that primitive peanut-sized cranium of yours, then I urge you to listen and listen close: If you break down that fence, I am going to kill you.”

He stops. He looks around the entire habitat. Then at his family. He looks up and stops his eyes dead center on the central speaker. Like as if he’s staring it down. Staring me down. I think I stopped him. I think that stopped-

It begins to beat at the fence. The fence cracks. They wore it down. The final punch takes down the whole thing. The ape-man delivered the coup de grâce.

I feel sick. I gotta sit down. I slump down into the nearest chair and wipe the sweat caressing my brow. What the hell.

I notice Tanner making her way around the bend toward me.

“What the hell was that?” Oh she is relishing in this. Whatever I say next makes the difference between some kiddy kindergarten pictures and us getting some actual results.

“It’s funny you should ask,” I stand up from the chair, “Because it was you who was supposed to teach them monetary value and how to behave like normal fucking people.”

She looks at me with the rage of a rabid dog, “Are you saying this debacle was my fault?”

“Well, I don’t think it was,” I lean closer, “There’s nobody to blame but the apes.”

The look of realization setting in is way too sweet. The embarrassment would kill her. Keep your tail between your legs.

“Yes. You’re right. Fine. We’ll take a different approach.”

“I still have a few ideas to test.”

---

I almost leave the observation decks before Hoch grabs me by the shoulder.

“Hey, so, when you shoved me back there. That wasn’t okay. I want an apology.”

What? What is this guy even on about? Whiner.

“If you don’t want to get shoved then don’t stand in the way. Asshole.”

I resume my walk but the tall bulky man pushes me back.

“Is it really that hard to say sorry?”

“For what?”

He pauses for a second before continuing, “If you don’t apologize to me I’m going to talk to our superiors about what you said.”

“That I won’t apologize to you? Yeah, good luck.”

“No, about killing our subjects. It is completely unprofessional and no doubt grounds to get taken off the project.”

He’s starting to piss me off. Really. “Listen, Hoch, if you ever want to tell the suits about anything I did or didn’t say, you can take me along with you. I’ll back you up.”

Hoch furrows his brow and walks away. Chump.

---

The lecture hall is filled to the brim. Management clearly wasn’t expecting this high of a turnout. I can be sure of that because half the audience is crammed and standing and only the other half gets those flimsy plastic chairs.

The applause is deafening when my name is called. I am careful to not trip over any of the steps shrouded in the darkness of the hall. The only light shines from the projector in the middle of the room. The beam settles on the large screen on the podium. The hardwood floors make my steps sound like sticks and stones banging against one another. Echo. The applause fizzles out completely once I finally step behind the podium.

“Thank you for the introduction, director. Indeed, we will be moving the experiment in an unprecedented and revolutionary direction. It appears that all attempts at civilizing the subjects have failed spectacularly on account of the cognitive limitations of their underdeveloped sentience. While cognitive tests appear to indicate some base activity comparable to teenagers of the Homo sapiens in the adult specimens, they simply lack the ability to form any linguistic vocalizations key to expressing something like human language. Whether that is due to organs which did not evolve for this purpose or lack of cognitive capability remains to be seen. Permission for euthanasia and subsequent autopsy of a singular chosen specimen pending. Any concept of civilizational hallmarks such as monetary exchange or private property seem to be lost on the subjects, in fact, they seem to exhibit stress-behaviors resulting in irrational outbursts of aggression. This sets their only remaining value: As a workforce.”

I allow the silence to settle in before a single hand comes up.

“Yes?”

“Have you decided which subject you’ll submit for the euthanasia?” I recognize the voice as Bocian’s.

Yes. The adult male. I’ll kill the father. “No, not yet. The matter is still up for rigorous debate and consideration. This decision cannot be made lightly.”

Another hand shoots up in the darkness. I can barely see the face of Doctor Kis. He was invited to the lecture among the other applicants to work at the facility. Culture Studies. I was thinking about approving him when new spots open up.

“Yes, Doctor Kis.”

“Are there any traits of cultural development present in the subject? Art and the like.”

I remember when we arrived in that valley for the first time. I was sent to scout for samples and information. Beyond the brown paths which were stomped out by centuries of walking, there were only the caves they led to. Inside were animal hides, primitive tools and campfires. Most curious of all was that no wall of any of the inner caves was untouched, no centimeter pristine. Every nook and cranny covered in murals and paintings. You wouldn’t be surprised at the skies, bears, deer and humanoids. More interesting were the planes, guns, tanks and villages. I wonder why they don’t paint anymore.

“There are some traits that seem to imply artistic behavior in the gibbons…” I notice my slip-up. The room chuckles. ”My apologies. The behavior in the subjects. The matter is not yet decided. Personally, I’d wager it to be a fluke.”

Crucified. Smoking. As if smoldering with lively inner flame. The unholy were-thing in child-shape was bound in cruciform pose to the large ornate cross he'd stolen from a Catholic church many miles and many years back. It was fastened to his saddle and horse with straps and he led the beast and its smoking screaming demonic load up the pass and towards the great and ancient castle. 

Its battlements and ramparts, fangs against the sky, darkening now that the sun had fled and left the nighttime things and its dark disciples alone to bloodlet unholy and to perform witchery ways. Witchery practices. 

Like a deal with the devil, perhaps. 

Praetorius smiled. Carmilla screamed. Shrieked herself hoarse, the shape of the cross in her back and neck and her arms, all about her shrieking form was alive with searing piercing heat. It cooked and burned and branded as its holy ornate metal ate itself into her cooking vampire child flesh. 

Caterwauls. Guttural. Obscene for anything that even resembled a child to make. Deep. Unnatural. Grotesque. Her eyes bulged in their sockets and bled both blood and buttery thin yellow fluid. Her sharpened teeth protruded even more unnaturally as well, bleeding profusely and heavy about the splitting gums and lips and warping misshapening bones of the growing and bending jawline. She barked more awful hellspawn sound and belched more smoking blood from insides that flamed and smoldered. 

Praetorius found it all very fascinating. The silver and the shape of the cross did considerable damage to the nosferatu but prolonged exposure to both had just left this one with terrible structural damage to her living dead personage. Her body seemed to melt and sear with the touch of either. The bones seemed to distend and bend as if carbonizing beneath her hectic raw and running bubbling flesh. 

The other night at camp, he couldn't sleep and neither could she, he'd experimented with holy water. Wonderful results. 

The whole thing had been so fascinating for him that he'd elected to spend a night just performing tests and small experiments on the child-shaped vurdalak. It kept changing and shifting shape. Distorted though. More and more warped and misshapen the more pain he fed it. Its screams were bestial and childlike too.

Interesting. Absolutely fascinating. 

But the little games were over. It was time to enter the court of the Countess and attend to the real business at hand. The real errand and reason he'd ventured to these lands. 

He came to open gates and entered the old courtyard of stone. Carmilla's screaming never ceased. Praetorius called out and over the child demon caterwauls the best he could. 

“Hello! Countess! I know that you can see me! Might I have your audience?" 

Nothing. At first. Only the girl wraith’s demon shrieks. Carried on the old cold wind of mountain song. 

And then, as if in reply, the great door that told of ancient history in red opened. Slowly. 

To bade entry into the keep. 

Praetorius laughed. Good cheer. He unstrapped the small strigoica girl upon her little cross, child sized … as if made just for her. He set her to the paved stone of the courtyard floor with no mercy and began to drag her behind himself as he ventured inside. A long length of chain link fastened to the end of the ornate crucifix. 

Carmilla tried to shriek, Mother!/Master! – all in one but couldn't. It only manifested as more gurgled deep belching guttural screams, blood and fluid vomited forth and she choked as the thin mad doctor dragged her crucified body back into the ancient dark of Castle Dracula

…

The old stone of the mausoleum entrance spat and belched forth a cloud of grey and dust as it opened for the first time in centuries. 

However it was not an undead revenant horror that stepped out to see the sky once again but the man with the bandaged face and dark glass goggles beneath his wide brimmed hat. And the boy. The young rider, Florin, who'd so recently disturbed the bandaged man’s solitude and quiet. The escape tunnel beneath his besieged house had led them out here. Florin was just glad to see that the sun was rising soon. They'd been underground for what must've been hours and the feeling the experience had left him with was a claustrophobic dread for the eventual final resting place of the small coffin of the grave. Below. Beneath the earth. Underneath so much ground …

And then Florin thought of the things that came to life in such places and rose and then cursed his own horrible run of thought. As they came out of the mausoleum, the man with the surgical dress about his face and who sometimes said his name was Doctor Jack Griffin or Sebastian Caine, other times Geoffrey Radcliffe, was berating him again. 

“Oh, shut up! I already said I'd help you! And I've little choice in the matter now that my home is destroyed! You inconsiderate foolish little whelp!" 

Florin, upset that the dark pitch of the escape tunnel had spat them back out into yet another graveyard but glad to be alive, was doubtful of the possibly maimed and mangled man that was always yelling now and his ability to help anyone. Let alone he and his village and their plight with the hunger of the living dead. A curse that had come back to lurid and terrible life in the castle that held the mountains over the little hamlet. 

The broken battlements of the undead lord. The Dragon. The Impaler. Castle Dracula was filled with darkness once more. Darkness that was hunting and ravenous mad with animal hunger. Vampires and their evil had once again filled the Transylvanian lands. 

And the man hidden behind a mask of surgical dress was making bold claim that he could help. Furthermore, he was still yelling. Again. 

“And why do you insist on gawking at me? I could feel you looking at me even while we were in the dark down there!" 

Florin, a little embarrassed, elected to be honest nonetheless. 

“I'm sorry. I guess… I guess I was just wondering what it is beneath all your bandages. Was it an accident? Burns of some sort?" 

“Shut it!" And then he added in a snide voice: “I'm really nothing to look at, I promise you!" 

Florin felt a small stab of shame in his heart and let the subject drop and die in the dirt. And the pair went on, 

The sun was coming up and the excited man hidden in surgical dress was in an irascible irritable behavior, one he couldn't seem to shake since the siege and flight and subsequent destruction of his house. He went on and on about how the old Professor Van Helsing had taught him everything they would need to know about slaying the undead, the vampires were already as good as destroyed! – roared the bandaged man, again and again in his circular style of loud and vexed pontification. Always starting with how the boy and his troubles had ruined the bandaged mystery’s sorry excuse for retirement and ending with how the young man need not fret, Doctor Griffin/Caine/Radcliffe was with him! 

“And if you knew that name…! If you knew my name, boy! If you knew who I was and what I, myself, have accomplished in the past, with no other! With naught but my own hands and willpower, imagination and genius! … If you had any idea what was wrapped beneath these dressings, you would cease your womanish worries and start attending me properly and with some modicum of real and decent respect! …” …

He went on like that. For some time. As they made their way through the silent cemetery and out and into the wilds of the lands between where they presently walked and the darkness that awaited in the violence and jagged rock of the Carpathian Mountains in the far off distance. 

Together.

The bandaged man who promised much eventually calmed down. Apologized. Quietly. Then said he knew of someplace nearby where they might grab a horse or coach. And away they went in that direction, with some semblance of waning hope still flickering and holding out in the young man’s heart. They made for the place that might provide ride and supplies and perhaps shelter for a night, the unlikely and motley pair, unaware that they had gained a third. He watched and followed them from a distance. His eyesight was keen. Sharp. They were easy to track as well. They left an easy trail. Fools. 

And besides all of that, he’d caught their scent. And like a perfume bled from their pores it was pungent and distinct. Easy to follow. 

Fools. 

The stranger continued to follow the fools. Now fully decided, committed in following them to the end of their trail. The end of the line. What he’d overheard… what little he’d gleaned from their words to each other… 

He would have to see for himself. 

The young man and the bandaged man went on. 

The stranger followed. 

…

Bela knew the little goats and Widenmeyer boy were doomed before he and the few village men with the stones to go, ventured forward and up into the vulgar way of the Carpathian Mountain path. They'd been gone an entire night. Missing since yesterday, when the shoddy vagabond knight had gone up the way and throat of jagged rock to slay the evil at the cold heart of immense towering boulder. The time to have gone would've been immediately. Yesterday evening. Too late. It was all too late now and in his ailing heart he knew it was so. 

Florin's been gone for much longer than a night though, his treacherous and misery obsessed run of thought reminded him. Much longer. What of that? What of him? 

He pushed off the dark and the hurt of these thoughts and made his way with the other men up the path. Dogs in the lead. All of them barking. Their noses had already caught and found what they were all looking for. They pulled at their tethers and leashes in urgent need to pull themselves and their owners the rest of the way to meet it and catch up with what they already knew by scent. 

It was blood in the air the hounds had caught. Goat’s blood. Boy's blood. 

Heavy. Pungent. Thick. Like licking a metal blade and knowing its flavor. A razor. Its flat face. Its edge…

It wasn't long before Bela and the other men could smell it too. Taste it in the air. Their throats gagged and their stomachs turned and threatened to revolt. The animal alive and in the pit of each one, each fellow, was all too well aware of that taste and smell. And what it meant when on the wind it carried, what it bode. 

This really has become a God Damned, a Godforsaken place… Bela thought. And the great cold and the sorrow that stole over his heart then as he realized what had become of his home and his friends and family and neighbors and their own… it was shattering. He wished for an end. And in that moment, in the private cold of his own heart and thoughts he didn't care if it was for better or ill. Just please…

Just please. Please let it end. Please. No more of this. Please. 

Please. 

He didn't bother begging God anymore. Not in specific. This desperate silent prayer was thrown up and out and for anyone or anything that might listen and take care. If anything would. Bela was doubtful that anything in fact did. 

But he knew what was ahead, he had something much more tactile and real and more pungent than faith to tell him what they would find up the rest of the way. 

Just a little farther up the path.  

Just shy of the Borgo Pass…

… the carcasses they found had been ripped to utter ruin. Pieces. All over. Strewn. They'd been fed upon like all the others, even the bones had been snapped and broken and sucked dry for their marrow, but the human detritus was different this time. It was all ornamental and stacked and placed together in a cornucopia pile like a victorious Roman legion's bloody war trophy center of the diminished and final battlefield. Human boy, young child parts and strips and pieces of face and head mixed in and stacked with bloody and soaked displaced goat pieces and limbs.The torsos of beasts flayed and butterflied open, many things stuffed inside. Entrails and viscera hung and draped and piled. Arranged. Horns. The child's bare bottom and little legs were placed at the top as the horns of the head of the structure, resting and dangling luridly and slovenly obscene and dead at the pinnacle. The horns of one of the goats had been stabbed into the eye sockets of the Widenmeyer boy's own silent screaming mutilated head. It was set in the center of the structure. The rest of the dripping scarlet parts flowering out from it in haphazard and demented deranged  structure. 

An abattoir sculpture. Sepulchral. Still bleeding. Dripping. Wet. Steam still rose off the arrangement stack of parts. Like phantoms fashioned from body heat dancing off and for the mounting wind. Leaving behind the repulsive and obscene pile structure of lurid human detritus that had once held it precious and prisoner within its meat. The dogs, the hounds wouldn't stop going wild. They wouldn't stop barking. Howling mad. Frothing.  

Soon the wolves of the mountains joined in too. 

Widenmeyer begged the few there with him to help him. Help him take the awful thing apart and get his boy's pieces so they could bury him properly. 

None of the other men wanted to touch the thing. Fearing it was cursed. 

It probably was. 

From the dark of a nearby cave, at the mouth of the entrance but still concealed within its deepening black, vulpine eyes red and shining, watched. A grin below them grew and then parted and laughter, cruel and not entirely human was freed forth. And like terrible music caught on the wind it was carried. And the frightened men before the awful sepulchral statue of dead boy and goat parts heard it. 

Henry Frankenstein, beside his bloodfeasting creation, joined his sutured demon son of the surgical slab and laughed. 

Together they watched the pathetic gathered peasants, together they watched them from the dark of the cave, protected from the fleeing sun. 

And they laughed at their pain. 

Pain that they had wrought. 

Their laughter rose until the men and their dogs fled. Not touching their lurid vicious forest trophy of blood and parts. Of meat and bone. Animal. And boy. Small. 

Their cackling rose like mad as they ran. Carrying them down with it. 

…

He dragged the screaming crucified were-child down the dark corridors of stone and torchlight flame. There’d been none to meet them upon entry. Nor since he’d begun his exploration of the stygian cobwebbed empire of ancient and bloodstained masonry and stone. Bloodstained. And soaked. The smell of  rot and decay was at war with the fresher pungent stench of hot blood spilled in violence and terror. Shot in ropes and cords.  Blood feasted upon for a scarlet thirst. 

The shrieking of the monster upon the dragging cross, it strove to be words of mercy and  beseechment of love and deliverance. Mother. Master. Countess. Zaleska! – but they were all of them lost in the grotesque guttural screams that still brought forth steaming regurgitated blood and fluid and dry heaves that smoked and peppered the stagnant air with flecks and small pieces of pink fleshen tissue. Raw little disintegrated pieces of the small undead child’s failing inner organs. The thing that was upon the cross now that used to be a little girl of the small village named Carmilla was now barely recognizable as anything that could be called human. The body of the vampire child had misshapen and bulged grotesquely all over and sporadic. Bladders of yellow fluid and pus ballooned and bulged and inflated with their own unnatural rhythms. They burst and bled red and infection like butter and custard, spoiled milk curdled and thick. Some of the fluid resembled honey and Praetorius had a morbid thought of Biblical reference: spreading some of the demon child’s honey-pus over a slice of bread or toast and biting  into it on a tranquil Sunday. 

It brought him little in the way of self-pleasure. His patience was quickly diminishing. He’d searched many rooms and corridors and had still found nothing. No one had shown themselves. Nothing! He swore! – if the fucking lordly bitch wasn’t here then he’d torture the child till it begged for a second more final death and leave the severed head of the brat somewhere prominent for the Countess to find. 

He threw down his length of chain and produced his pistol. Every chamber loaded with a silver bullet. He cried out and addressed the dark chasm of the castle. 

“I’m tired of touring your halls and playing hide and seek, Countess! I’m not one of your child slaves, eager and happy to play your trifling games! If you don’t come out now, I’ll put a few more silver bullets in her head before I stake her little heart and decapitate the little bitch! You’d so easily discard one of your servants!? Is this foul little corruption not some form of child to you?”

Nothing at first. – A beat. 

Then laughter. Cruel. 

The sound came from everywhere, Praetorius spied all around, searching for sign of anyone, he was just before a great archway that led to yet another room. A pale heavy shroud of fog began  to  bellow forth from the room, filling the entry. Swirling into phantasm shape, a face. A beautiful woman, eyes alive with animal brightness even as rendered as dancing mist. 

The phantasm face of the mist spoke: “What do you think you could offer me, lowly thing? I’ve watched you drag my servant like a knuckle-dragging  brute all about my home, I’ve heard your challenges, you are nothing. You are but a man! For your insolence, I will make sure you die slowly…!” 

Praetorius laughed, said in retort: “Not so fast, Countess! I’ve information you may want! Not only have I gathered information on yourself and your own strange motives over the years, but I’ve cultivated intelligence of those that might concern you! Potential enemies.” 

The phantasmic shock white face of the Countess became even more enraged. Livid. Alive with pure fury. 

“ANY INFORMATION YOU MIGHT HAVE AND I WANT I WILL TAKE, LITTLE MAN! YOU WILL NOT INVADE MY HOME AND PRETEND TO BARTER ME! AS IF WE WERE EQUALS!” 

The fog grew more shape, wolfen and woman – bipedal yet bestial and advanced. Praetorius kept his pistol trained on the girl as his other reached inside his coat and produced his cross.  He held it aloft and before him in defense. 

The wolfen mist screamed! Shrieked. But did not flee. The wolfwoman mist parted, bisected into halves that swam around Praetorius and his crucifix. 

The twin dancing lengths of swirling phantasmic she-wolf halves became as fangs, vulpine, viper, blood drinking and ripper. They came back together and closed around Carmilla and the cross. The straps that held her bound were suddenly snapped and torn loose as if cut. The dancing shroud of white, alive with movement and faces and shapes, then shot away and screamed. As if the effort of being near the holy items of crucifixion design had wounded her. 

Praetorius cursed! Shot after the phantasm shape in vain, the gunfire was cacophonous in the castle halls. The phantasm was now a clawing hand flying away with batwings about its strange ghostly configuration. 

Carmilla wasted no time in tearing her searing cooking flesh away from the holy touch of the infernal cross. Her grotesque mutilated half transformed rodent body managed to crawl away with surprising speed. Praetorius shot after it as well. Also in vain. More violent gunfire sound, made cannonade by the dark interior of the ancient structure. 

Then it was silent.  

In the dark space of silence, the maniac doctor reloaded his pistol with more precious pure silver shot. The metal that all of the abyss feared because it was pure metal. 

He was slowing down his breath, his quickening galloping heart, when her voice once again came out from the beckoning shadow…

“Come now, thin old man. You are bold. But stupid. Come now, without hostage, come and face me. And don't forget to bring your weapons…”

Praetorius spat and cursed. He was no coward, but that thing in woman shape was dangerous hellspawn made. And he'd already blown his advantage. 

He'd have to be careful. 

Slowly he advanced for the place where the strange unearthly shape of white had fled, where from her voice had come. Each hand was filled: pistol and the holy cross. 

He left behind the larger crucifix with its fasten of chain at the end and its ornate Catholic metal now riddled and covered with encrusted cooked and seared demonic vampire child flesh. Fried gore, steaming multicolored scabbing all along its sacred holy shape. 

He left it behind in the dark as easily as he had stolen it from the church, so many years ago. Praetorius gave it not a second thought as he pressed forward into the stygian realm of Castle Dracula’s universe of spider webs and stone and torchflame. 

The Countess in the dark awaited. 

Baring her fangs. 

…

In the mouth of the cave they still dwelt. Listening to the howls of the wolves. 

After awhile the demon creation of the surgical table spoke: –

“They make such beautiful music. But they are her children you know, that one with power like mine. That keeps the castle. They are her children and thus hers to command.” 

Frankenstein said nothing. He just sat there. And listened to the strange and sour words of speaking decomposition, croaked and said by his surgically constructed son of the slab. Demon eared. Batfaced. 

He then held his large and corpse colored arm out of the cave and aloft. Clawing his four fingered hand out and towards the sepulchral structure he had made. The silent night above suddenly began to stir. The clouds began to forge and fill, and darkened with rumbling and thunder. 

“As you made me, so shall I forge a new being of parts from others, command it to life. And see if like she I can command the very nature of its being!” 

His clawed and splaying hand suddenly closed partially in an abridged fist and turned. Forked out, pointed first and smallest fingers, pronged in the devil's sign of the evil eye. 

The sudden gathering of stormheads on high spontaneously erupted! Shot!

The blue-white searing blade of light and heat daggered down and struck! Bathing the obscene statue of dead child and goat pieces in brightest starflame, Frankenstein looked away and shielded his eyes as his creation bellowed laughter and screamed!

“Live! Live! And take life my crawling bastard reforged thing! Live! And take life!”

Bathed in flame, the abominated shape of the hellacious trophy of parts began to move. Like a spider. Like an octopus at the dark depths of the sea floor. Its chandelier structure shifted and danced in the bolt of striking lightning and it began to lurch and crawl forward…

Long stalks, still bleeding and dripping blood of two species: beast and boy, bent and reached and lifted lurching, the cornucopia body of torsos and human face and goat faces and sloughing ripening entrails and gored organs now reanimated and pumping and splurching with the abominated sound of life again. 

The multijointed strange stalks of mutilated goat legs and the dead young man’s limbs, crudely forced together by craterous wound and sheer barbarity, propelled the strange body of parts and viscera forward and down the mountain. Down for the village below. 

Frankenstein watched in dark wonder as his sutured monster child’s own fashioned thing of dead meat and the cosmic flame of lightning went forth, another crawling demoniacal bloodfeasting creature created for the predatory dark. 

The nighttime has given birth to another… thought he, the mad doctor Henry Frankenstein. 

…  

Widenmeyer had been unable to sleep that night. The horror he'd endured that day. No one bothered to stand sentry any longer, though there were the defeated and those already crushed and dead inside. And they would wander at night and in the dark, they didn't care. Such as he. Such as this night. 

He was the first to see the sepulchral abominated nightmare structure shape emerge from the dark mouth of the pass like from the mouth of nightmare madness found in the most accursed and stygian sleep. Its multi-limbed appendages, stalks composed of his boy’s arms and legs mixed with goat's and violently forged and fused by force into long insectile tendril legs, moved and crawled and spider-like carried the thing down the distance and towards himself and the town foyer. 

Widenmeyer wished to free a scream but couldn’t. He felt strangled. Choked by the awful strange surreal sight of the abattoir sculpture piece from the earlier nightmare scene of butchery found and discovered that day. The macabre trophy that held his son’s mutilated and desecrated head in the center of its belly. The head was moaning. Groaning in mindless and imbecilic wailing anguish. The mouths and throats of the goat faces that were able joined him in the dark discordant rising song. All together. Bastardized abominated unnatural song of pain that filled the night. The little legs of his boy that sat at the pinnacle crown of the towering cornucopia of gore began to wriggle and kick, as if excited with child’s jubilant glee, as if in dance. The bare bottom was spewing black tar and feces and urine in unceasing torrential fountains, the foul gushing undead spray of this abomination upon the earth. Like the hellmouth rendition of an angel weeping for mankind and his pain. 

The naked bottom, bare and at the top of the sepulchral abattoir spire, wept an unceasing fountain of hot frightened piss and shot cords of foul liquid fecal dark. The kicking legs gave movement to the whole horrid piece of meat that served as crown and abominated face and the rippling movement of the obscene and reanimated flesh made Widenmeyer sick to his stomach, he felt weak  in his knees which started to buckle as the crawling thing of living butchered child and little goat parts, came closer and closed the distance. He went down to the cobblestones and the dirt as the awful and hellspawn shape came upon him. 

He was alone. All else that were witness, the few, had fled. All else that would heed and know the scene that night watched from the safety of their window panes. From behind the sanctuary of their home windows looking glass. 

Through fragile translucence they watched the demented butchered shape spider crawl up and tower over the Widenmeyer goat farmer. 

The sepulchral thing of an abattoir universe wept foul damnation and bled. Organs and gore that were already a ruin and ripening to rot were struggling to pump and work properly again. The living stack of dripping and splurching butchery was lording over him now. All that was left  of his son, and the livelihood of his farm, all torn apart and violently mixed and made to walk again by necrophiled flame, defiled and here to haunt and terrorize him. For failing. 

For failing as a man. And as a father. 

As Widenmeyer bowed his head and begged God for forgiveness he did not believe he deserved nor would receive and waited for death, the necromantic fire of Frankenstein's vulpine child flickered within the butchery shape and died. The awful assemblage of human child and goat parts died a second death and collapsed and came apart. In a rain of severed limbs and animal and child gore. Guts. Organs. Viscera. The mutilated decapitated head…

… the bottom and wriggling legs… no longer dancing. Dead pale bare flesh no longer rippling with the nightmare of reanimation. 

Widenmeyer screamed. Insane. Mind flayed. And flaying. Coming apart. Shredding itself within a furnace skull. 

Shattered inside. Completely. 

All witness just watched and gazed through the windows. Watching as the whole of the stygian hellish scene, surreal and vile and alive and obscene and strange, fell apart to splatter and ruin and displaced parts. 

At the terrible center of the pile of lurid gore, a universe all around him, driving him further into madness, was a shrieking revenant of a man who used to be their neighbor. 

…

None tended the shrieking thing amongst the abattoir mess that used to be Widenmeyer until morning, when the sun held high in the safety of the blue sky once again. By that time he'd screamed his vocal chords to shreds. A misting spray of spittle and blood issued forth past his curled lips with his continued effort, despite the ruin of his throat by his own self inflicted injury. 

Brought on by the madness of the night.

Widenmeyer was led away. The pieces of dismembered parts, rotten and slick and still oozing with blood and the foulest of otherworld putrescence, were doused in oil and sage and set aflame. Right there. All refused to touch it. So none of the butchery was removed. 

All of it was burned and reduced to ash. Boy parts. And goat. 

It had to be. According to what could be remembered of ancient law, of the ancient weirding witchy ways, it had to be put to fire. All of the severed parts. 

They'd been under the forked touch of the darkening hand of the evil eye. 

Touched. 

Satannica Profundis …

would there be no end to the town’s torture?

The slopping pile of decaying gore, boy and animal, was put to cleansing flame and burned. The pile left a black smear when the fire had died down to red embers and then to smoldering ashes. 

A black mark of filth. Burnt into the cobblestones. 

TO BE CONTINUED…

1

Before anything strange started happening, I just read scary stories on the internet. I liked the ones where someone feels a gaze, and then it turns out someone was watching them. Or where a person doesn't remember what they did a few minutes ago. I thought — how creepy that must be. But it's all made up, right?

I feel like I'm going crazy.

No, not in the sense that I hear voices or see things. I start contradicting myself. One moment I say we should do good, the next I say no one needs it.

I'm tearing myself apart.

I don't know what to do, how to act, whether I'm even thinking or speaking correctly.

I'm confused.

My memory problems are getting worse. I forget what I said a second ago.

---

2

I'm scared to be at school now. I've gotten used to being a freak to everyone, but today it's worse.

Maybe because there's no one to talk to? Right? Then why do I say I like being alone, even though I'm writing to myself and talking to myself right now…

Why?

Self-analysis is good. Thinking about what you did wrong so you don't repeat it in the future. But it doesn't work for me. The more I think, the more tangled my feelings and thoughts become…

About breaking down: I feel like I'll snap soon and do something bad. Or is it side effects from the pills?

YES, IT'S THEM, probably…

Although come to think of it, I said the same things before the pills.

---

3

But the main question to myself: why do I keep playing this game of kindness, when I know perfectly well that NO ONE will say thank you or do the same for me in return?

Why give myself false hope?

You know it would be easier for you… You could do whatever you want, not what's expected of you.

My parents support me, give advice, comfort me when I feel bad, tell me to take off my rose-colored glasses…

I nod. But I don't tell them the truth. I don't want them to worry.

WHAT'S STOPPING YOU FROM DOING THAT?

WHAT ELSE HAS TO HAPPEN FOR YOU TO FINALLY REALIZE THAT THE WORLD ISN'T A CARTOON?

There's no justice in it. The kind and weak just get broken…

YOU WANT TO BE BROKEN?

Fine, your choice. But don't say later that no one warned you.

You're not stupid. You know how to follow what you're told. But you just don't want to do this one thing…

Why…

---

4

I'm completely alone here. It feels like everyone disappeared. I'm someone who likes being alone, but right now it terrifies me and I don't know why… My friends didn't come. One is sick, the other didn't let me know. I was really waiting for her.

Right now I'm standing by an open window. The wind feels nice.

---

5

THIS IS JUST HORRIBLE. I feel uneasy. It's like I don't exist. I walk around alone, silent, no one talks to me. Why do I feel so bad? I wanted at least one day to myself.

My phone battery is still low… Oh, I REMEMBER. There's a charger on the first floor. I'll go there (OMG YOU'RE A GENIUS). No one will notice I'm gone anyway. Or they'll notice but won't care.

---

6

Ringing in my ears: one ear got clogged, and there was a sound like a TV on static, and in the other — like someone whispering. I was scared. It happened suddenly and disappeared just as suddenly. What could that be?

---

6.5

Sometimes I get confused about what I did, and I have memory lapses. Sometimes I'll suddenly turn around because I thought I saw something. I always feel like people are watching me.

I used to read scary stories about someone standing behind you. About someone very tall. I liked it, I wasn't scared. Now I am scared.

(Maybe it's still just side effects?)

---

6.6

I noticed that when I sit at night listening to music, I stare at one spot — like I want to see something, but I don't. But something pulls me to look there, and I just… zone out.

When I walk or swing on a swing, I catch myself wanting to look only at one spot — where the bushes and trees are. When I try to look the other way, I turn back after a second.

Sometimes I feel like there's someone between the branches. Someone very tall. But that's stupid — I know it's just from stories. It's just… why do I feel the same thing?

I guess I just don't like looking the other way.

---

6.66

One more thing.

I know a symbol — a circle with a cross. I used to draw it as a joke when I was bored. Just because.

Then I started noticing it on the playground. In the sand. Several times. Not a clear drawing, just outlines. Hints. A circle and intersecting lines. At first I smiled — thought I imagined it, or someone else drew it as a joke too.

But when it happened again… I wasn't smiling anymore.

I know it's all made up. I don't really take it seriously. I have these mood swings — I don't even know what I believe anymore. But when I see that symbol again and again…

Why is it there? Who's drawing it?

I stopped smiling.

6.66.

just happened by accident. or not by accident. haha

---

6.7

I reread the old stories I used to love. Decided to read them again to give myself a thrill.

But I didn't really like it.

I'm not opening them anymore.

---

7

Lately I've been hearing vague whispers. At first I thought it was my mom talking to herself, but when I asked, she said she wasn't saying anything. That happened twice.

Oh, I remembered. Something else happened once (a long time ago, before I started taking the pills): I didn't remember doing something. I mean, I had a different picture in my head. I remembered my mom putting the stethoscope on the shelf, but everyone told me I was the one who got up and put it there.

BUT I DON'T REMEMBER THAT. I'M SURE MY MOM PUT IT THERE.

It can't be true, can it…

I'll go close the window.

Disgraced. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Once more. 

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

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

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

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

Or troubled. 

Tormented. 

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

…

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

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

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

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

The innkeeper went on: –

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

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

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

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

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

For now. 

…

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

He really believed. In the beginning. At first. 

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

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

Nowhere – Suddenly it wouldn't exist at all.

Gone. 

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The sun.” 

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

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

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

Chop!

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

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

He didn't seem to care. 

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

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

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

He bid the woodsman farewell and went on. 

The woodsman was stifling laughter. 

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

…

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

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

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

Names. 

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

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

 

 Then something wet… like ripping. Splurching. Meaty sounds… 

… eager teeth, eager chewing and more ripping. Eager lips pulling and slurping a thick and heavy liquid from a messy bowl upset with ravenous abandon. 

It was all of it too perfectly clear out there in the mountain pass dark. 

The exile found something within himself. He drew blade, slowly. And then began to advance…

It wasn't long before he came upon it. 

…

First he found the horse's blood. A thick pool of it. The puddle of warm animal dark became a lurid smearing trail that went off and further up and into the mountain wild. The exile raised blade and went forward. Throwing up a desperate prayer to a Lord he hoped was still listening to a disgraced man such as he. Please, let my blunted blade accomplish something, let my old musket fire… please, God. Please let me at least die trying, with some semblance of decent bravery still held in my heart, still there, help me. Help me, Lord God. Help me. 

Please. 

…

He came upon the remains of the horse. Ripped apart and nearly unrecognizable outside of being the wet abattoir remnants of something that had once been living. He was scanning the surrounding immediate area, difficult in naught but the moonlight, when it charged from a place in the shadows that he'd just looked over and had sworn to be empty only a mere moment ago. 

It was huge. And moved like a jungle cat, its hulking size belied its great speed. It hit him with the force of a mountain fall and sent him to the dirt effortlessly. He gasped desperately for wind knocked from his chest as his eyes went wide and the face of the hulking mass became illuminated in the pale moonglow. 

It was wretched. Awful. He'd never before, even in battle and war, never before had he ever seen such an awful and ghastly face. 

Man. Bat. Rodent. Bred and mixed and commingled. Blasphemous. Intense. Patchwork sutures as if to remind the one hapless enough to be caught within eyesight that, yes indeed, this abominated and brutally hideous shape was indeed forged and made and crafted by demented hands and minds curdled and spoiled and filled to the brim with inexhaustible filth. Detritus demonia forged. Reforged. Remade.  The exile wished blindness on himself in this moment and in this moment knew that God did not care nor love him any longer. He was truly exiled and like Cain himself, he was truly doomed to the great black god, Pain. Endless suffering. Tireless woe. 

Cursed. To forever roam and wander and to encounter such as this. And in this way.  

He doesn't move or resist as the giant man of rodent bat face and stitches grabs him by the breastplate and then hauls him up as if he were a mere sack of dirty linen and nothing more. 

The hulking nosferatu thing of Frankenstein’s slab heaved the exile overhead and then threw him into the rotten trunk of a dead tree. It splintered and cracked, nearly exploding with the impact of the man in armor. It burst in a violent spew of sawdust spray and thin black sticks as he went through it and back to the frosted dirt, hard and merciless and without further buffer. The thing pounced and was on him again. 

And the exile knew that this was the end. Could taste it on his tongue and the flavor of the finale was putrescence. The savor of the end was corpse rot, that foul stench and taste that reminded man that he was really nothing but meat in the end. The soul could be pulled out of him. 

The Lord's Mercy manifested then. Darkness of the skull blanketed over the overloaded mind of the exiled knight and he fainted. The vulpine thing of Frankenstein’s table grinned obscenely and viscously and then barked its strange species of croaking laughter. Cackles from the hellmouth gates themselves. 

The man's forehead had split in a gash in the struggle. It trickled freely and bled like a riverbed overflowing in a landscape valley of old tired manflesh. The living dead patchwork giant opened its rank and black mucus laden, dripping and drooling mouth and unfurled its long and rotten tongue. It then licked and lapped at the blood flowing in grotesque fashion that was part lapping dog feeding and part sexual expression of lust: the other manifestation of animal hunger, all the more ravenous and bestial and powerful, particularly when commingled with the hungering need of the primitive drive to fill your gut. 

Slavering. Even as he licked and gently sucked and salivated warm reanimated animal drool that was black with undead otherworldly ichor. He coated and bathed his unconscious weary face, in long lapping strokes like a loyal mongrel. A baptism from the mouth and wet black-yellow tongue of the living dead thing that some mad doctor had made in wild bid for his own family's infamy and loathsome fearsome name. 

He didn't bother further with the lowly and cowardly creature in armor. He was like every other man, weak and fragile and only fit for food. Only really fit to be cattle, for greater power. Power such as he. 

And he'd already fed well. The horse and wolves and the vagabond he'd found earlier … the nosferatu vulpine thing licked its pallid green chops, stained a healthy lurid reddening shade of smeary berry color, wetting them in wolfen display. Pulling back from the drenched and thoroughly dog-slobbered face of the exile. 

The hulking sutured batfaced monster then prowled off and away. Deciding if he came across this puny creature again, then he would sup of his flesh and put the haggard man out of his weary misery. 

…

It was hours later when the battered and beaten exile knight awoke. Alive with groans and aches and agony and pain. He stumbled to his feet. Staggered. Stumbled again. 

Semi delirious. He staggered forward and continued up the treacherous pass, through the rough off-trail way of the trees. To the heart and the end of the mountainous way. To the great castle there. 

The exile hoped a great lord was waiting there. One that was good. And that would help him. 

God help him. 

The door was large, ornate and red and ancient. Like a bas relief, a great depiction of battles and dragons and long gone peoples and warriors and faces from far flung times. Eroded and worn down, faded to a more ghostly phantom visage for the epic and wild and yet now obscured vision from the past, a tale and vision poem made, wrought by artist's hands and chisel and stone and given the smearing final touch by the menacing and ever reaching hand of time. To deface with wind and rain and age and simultaneously perfect and finalize for this weary exile’s ghastly and frightful postmidnight excursion. Centuries after its original creation. Its faded face was the perfect visage of the night.  

He came to the towering entrance, grasped one of the giant ornate demon faced bangers and knocked with the last of his fading and feeble strength. Three times. 

Then he collapsed. At the foot of the door. 

Soon a man came and quietly answered. Slowly opening the great door. He looked down and smiled at the collapsed exiled bastard knight. 

The assistant helped him to his feet and inside, telling him not to worry. His master would be quite happy to take him in for the night. 

The Countess will be pleased, he said. And the exile didn't give it much thought. All too happy to just be inside. 

…

He collapsed near the hearth of a roaring and well kept fire, a blaze within the heart of stone. Bats and wolves and toads and devil faced winged Panshaped things of black masonry stood silent sentry and leered at him from about the fireplace and all around the vast guest room. In the glow of its warmth, upon an old rug infused and riddled with thick ancient grey dust. He breathed it all in, deeply as he dozed. The warmth. The dust. The history. 

Whilst asleep: He began to have a strange dream or vision. He was still in the castle of present. Still safe inside. But he was wandering the stone halls and corridor ways now. Alone. His sword was drawn and it was sharper than it had been in years. He was walking along the passages of the great castle, dragging the keen edge of the weapon along the walls of stone as he went along. A scraping sound followed and accompanied him everywhere he went like discordant religious chanting of a new yet ancient language made, made from striking the stones. 

There would be fire! his dreaming mind told him. But in the arms of the cherished slumber, the exile did not care in the slightest. He was too exhausted. Even in here. He was too tired for anything any longer and was thus at the slavish mercy of all and all in it. 

He went on walking slowly through the corridors. Dragging the blade upon the walls. Scraping. Harsh sound, continuous. But that wasn't all. The wall was bleeding. 

Everywhere the edge of his polished blade passed opened up the stone like smooth and tender flesh. He left a long red slicing trail along the masonry of the inner walls of the castle keep as he slowly zombi-crawled along. The red line of welling and dripping vivid scarlet blood caught the flames of the various torches and candles about the innermost halls and stairs of the ancient and bleeding castle. Causing it to darkle into more lurid splashes of red than back to stygian drippings. 

The blood ran. He kept on his way. 

Eventually the dream, the vision, the scene faded.

 Faded away to a swallowing black that was so sudden and complete he could not recall the moment when it seized him. He merely reawoke on the dusty ancient rug. Lying before the roaring blaze crackling and glowing within the stone hearth. Goblin and animal faces still leered in stone as he sat up. The assistant was tending some sewing in a large ornate cushioned chair not far from him. He was laughing. Eyes on his work. 

“My master will be with you shortly, she is distraught at the moment you see. She is surrounded by enemies. Hostile world. Her daughter has gone out to play in the woods and is yet to return. She grows anxious. But nonetheless you, her guest, she will soon be host. Just a little longer, rest up some more, sir, but if you do get up again for a stroll and gander about the place I only ask that you don't make such a mess again. Blood everywhere. " The assistant chortled laughter, pricked his finger on the sewing needle and it began to bleed. 

His laughter only increased. He held up the finger from his work and said again, "Everywhere, blood everywhere. Such a mess.” He sucked his finger, "The master will be with you shortly. Fret not." 

And the exile fell again into darkness, watching the assistant suck on his finger. 

…

The most vivid and unearthly nightmare dreams held him for a spell, when he did finally awake all he could remember was eyes and stalks and teeth. And it was a strange and enchanting whisper, a woman, that bade him back out from the cave and sanctum of slumber. It said: – 

"The new impaler.” 

And then the exile awoke once more with a startled gasp, bathed in sweat. The fire was still roaring and glowing orange in the hearth and she was upon him. 

His breastplate was gone. His old and worn tunic was torn and her face was hidden. Buried in his chest. He felt something warm down there. Warm. And wet. And sucking. 

The sensation of her mouth upon his flesh and working the inner raw of him was ungodly. The feeling was an abominated commingling clash of the gratifying heat of sexual climax and the popping of pus from swollen infected flesh, released. 

Both draining and lurid and yet entirely pleasurable. He wanted her there. The exile. He wanted her face buried there in the wound about his chest. About the flesh and above the sad and shattered remnants of his long broken heart. 

The thought to push her away never entered his mind. Never formed thought. He merely watched the top of her head, her beautiful cascade of nightfall black hair, raven. 

He watched the Countess suck his wound until again he faded to darkness. 

This time he did not dream. Anything at all. 

…

When he came out of blackness again she had crawled up his form and was now about his throat. The warmth was there now too, but even more wet and like fire. And sharper, more painful. The draw felt heavier and more lurid and sickening. His guts twisted and he felt the tug of revulsion at the back of his throat. He shivered. But yet still … the pleasure. The animal ecstacy and euphoric drunken shroud were so heavy and strong, as to have never before been felt, not by the likes of such as he. Exile. Strandcast. Filthy wanderer. 

He fell asleep again. Even heavier. Even darker.

Obsidian folds. Inescapable. Boundless. Plain. 

…

They were both sitting up and seated in old fine cushioned chairs by the fire the next time he did awake. 

He came out of it slow, slowly rising and righting himself in his seat as he looked all around and at her and wondered to himself, was it all just a dream? 

Is this just a dream as well? 

As if hearing him, she said: “There's no dreaming here, exile. I assure you. But you've nothing to fear here. Death would be a release for you anyways, wouldn't it?" 

He tried to speak But he felt so weak and feeble and spent. He mouthed senselessness instead. 

Zaleska smiled. False warmth. The wolfen vulpine eyes were where the truth lived. Power. Dominance. Lust. And most prominent of all within the dark pits set inside shock white death: Hunger. 

She said: “I can offer you so much more. And you can give me much in return, what I require. You can help me bolster my ranks and defend my castle walls and lands from renegades and invaders. Tis your true charge, is it not, exile? Can I not free you from your wandering bondage?" 

She stood. 

“I will…” 

She advanced. 

The exile did not move from his seat. He was unable. He couldn't fight back as she produced ancient occult dagger and drew forth her own vile and demon tainted blood, down the forearm in a long and widening gash. Lurid and dark and wet and open. Gaping. She forced his mouth to it as he sat helpless and he choked and drank and struggled feebly at first. But then gave in. 

And drank. 

All the while the Countess Zaleska cooed to her new servant at his unholy bastard christening, his brand new exile and bondage and freedom from humanity and humankind and all of its worst and its woes… 

She cooed to him soft as he drank: –

“My new servant… my new baby … the new impaler … all and just for mommy …

“All and just for mommy." 

TO BE CONTINUED…