'Harps and Blood"
Current mood: devious
Category: Writing and Poetry

HARPS AND BLOOD

by Teri A. Jacobs

He masturbated to the siren of her screams. His hand, wet from her blood, slid slick and fast, and he kept his eyes screwed tight, imagining her behind the freezer’s steel door, frost upon her naked flesh, icicles of nipples, red gore steaming from her gaping slits.

Inspiration came then. Brutal and sharp, the harp song of his muse shuddered through his body, and it was almost as if he had become one with the dying girl, his insides twisting in rigor-mortis coils, his mouth screaming death. His muse snapped her harp strings into his mind, garrotting away any other thought but of the girl. And what he would do to her next.

####

Harini Venkitarma dreamed of home, of Churu in Rajasthan, India and its Salasar Balaji, the temple dedicated to Lord Hanuman, the Monkey God.

Dressed in a scarlet and gold sari, she stood beneath the temple’s idol and watched the monkey-faced god weep gypsum tears for the dead macaques fallen on the temple steps. Lakhs of devotees knelt beside her, gathering the gypsum. Their hands brushed across Harini’s toes and pulled pearls from her nails, and she screamed oil.

Their hands rubbed the oil into the monkey corpses.

Arid winds stole the flesh from Harini’s bones, and she watched the idol grin as her flesh turned to pink powder of rose petals and salts, as the hands worked the powder onto the monkeys.

Thousands of hands fanned fingers like flames and the funeral pyres burned to release the sacred monkey souls.

Along the temple steps, a myriad of blood-hued suns rose from the macaques in the dawn of resurrection and lit upon the devotees, dark flesh brightening, smoldering red, cindering away into the ash and breath of Hanuman.

Harini screamed as she was sucked into a deeper dream, into the hollow of the Monkey God...

####

"...I could die and who would ever know. I could wait, but no one ever shows. But I can make you look with this gun. So maybe I’m not like everyone..."

Hands upon the freezer door, he pressed his cheek against the cold metal and sighed in high-strung tones to the music.

He understood those lyrics. Only all too well, cruel knowing that he meant nothing to anyone in the world. Except to these women, who for a brief time looked upon him as if he were a god, their lives in the power and palm of his hands.

His hands, lingering on the door, sported the paint of her blood. Brutal henna designs decorated his hands. Pigments of poppy, puce, or madder brown swirled in the lines of his knuckles and cuticles, within every wrinkle and bone hollow atop of his hand, and in the grooves of his palm where he could read his fortune in her blood. All of it, rubies and roses.

Shame he would have to wash it away, he thought, but he would have a different keepsake when he was through with her.

Unlocking the freezer, he waltzed inside the chamber as though he were a prince who had stepped into an enchanted forest with its hoary mists and sleeping beauty.

gallery. On the floor, curled upon the scarlet satin of her frozen blood, the girl waited for his extraordinary hands to recreate her.

Lifted in his arms, she weighed marble-heavy with cold, and he carried her with some difficulty into the expansive kitchen.

She had been impressed with the kitchen, he recalled.

Chestnut cabinets with wrought iron handles lined three of the goldenrod stucco walls, and three wood-fired ovens and the ten-foot length of iron grills fit neatly against the fourth. In the center of the kitchen, a massive oak island rested like an ogre on his hands and knees. This image was further impressed by the various faces carved into the rim and the legs. Faces with oblong mouths and lengthy teeth which always frightened him as a child, five-years-old, hiding beneath the island while his mother prepared the restaurant’s main courses, thinking the counter would collapse upon him and swallow him up.

Ambrosia’s Restaurant, his mother’s dream and his legacy after her death. But he had to follow his dreams, not hers, as he laid the dead girl upon the oak-ogre island.

With a rag dipped in bleach, he cleaned her wounds, gently washing away the blood and loose tissue from the double vertical slats on each side of her neck, taking less care with the larger slashes on her thighs. Her flesh turned pliant in the warmth, and the deep cuts parted as he wiped.

Impulsively, he slipped a finger between the pink-lipped edges and into the soft cushion of thigh muscle. Moist, smooth ridges graced his finger.

Always inside a girl, this moistness, this meaty silkiness, he mused, removing his finger, bringing it beneath his nose and wallowing in her visceral scent. His erection strained against the denim.

Ignoring this ache, he took his paintbrush in hand instead.

From the spice rack, he removed two jars of paint and brought them to the counter. He stopped a moment before the pantry, wondering if he would need anything else. Pounds of glitter, metallic shavings, sand, nails, and bone fragments stocked the pantry shelves, and the cabinets housed containers of shells, teeth, stain-glass shards, razors, and velvet fabrics and needles. Every drawer housed some odd and hideous tool for his makings. In the refrigerator, organic material waited in suspended decay for his hands to sculpt and mold them into whatever his vision held for them.

Perhaps the metal bits, he decided.

He gathered the cannister in the crook of his arm and whistled on his way over to his blank cadaver-canvas. His equipment set upon the counter, he went to work.

Dipping the brush into the white paint, he dabbed the point onto her muddy-brown iris and swirled around her pupil. He uncolored her eyes. She stared as if with balls of snow at him, and a glint of a harp-strung idea flashed.

"Oh yes, perfect..." He returned to the pantry and pulled down the shaker of silver glitter and the fast-dry glue.

He applied the glue to her lashes and eyebrows and then sprinkled the glitter upon them. He liked the look so much that he emptied the bottle and glittered the dark blond coils of her pubic hair.

Next, on each eye, he let a drop of glue fall onto the white-washed center.

"For that sparkle in your eyes," he said as he spun the lid off the cannister and withdrew two square slivers of keen-thin steel.

The tiny squares were angled upon her eyes, diamonds glimmering in strange sight.

He painted her face, her chin-length hair, and body, even erasing the pink inside her mouth, vagina, and anus, until every inch of her glistened like fresh-fallen snow.

But her lips and nipples he colored blue. Cyanic blue, the tint of unoxygenated blood, the shade of stifled breath and cold death.

"My Ice Queen..." he breathed, trembling with anticipation, that when her paint and blood dried, he would crown her skull with shiny spikes.

####

Harini tossed in her sleep, tension ache and nightmare brimming in her head.

The sensorium of being in the dark of a god’s mind evaporated into a fertile shore, of moon-white locusts floating on lapis lazuli waters, of sacred woods of gold shading the burnt ocher sands, of innumerable schools of indigo fish darting beneath the surface and feeding on corpses.

On the corpses of apes, with sprouts of tuberous roots growing from their bloated bodies and drifting sinuous like ivory snakes.

The clang of swords echoed down to Harini. It carried the peel of temple gongs and gnashing teeth, and she saw a gory battle at hand beyond the forest.

Demons clashed with Hanuman’s army of apes. The Raksashas had the faces of wolves and the claws of tigers, but their skins were drab and smooth as any man, with livid bruises marking the injurious blows of the apes’ clubs. Oblivious to their traumas, the demons returned their strikes upon the apes. Fists severed apart sternums and punctured hearts, claws raked through underbellies and spilled guts, and jaws snapped upon grisly throats and chewed away breath.

The apes fell one by one, row by row, troop by troop, into the deep-blue waters and fed the deeper-blue denizens.

She trembled at their faces, so human and anguished, as they stared unseeing upon her.

"Beautiful as Sita," said a seductive voice behind her.

Turning, turning not only her head but the sky, Harini faced Ravana, the king of the Raksashas; the monarch demon who seized Punjikashthala, a nymph of Indra’s heaven, in lust and committed an evil offense; who abducted Sita, the wife of Rama; whom Rama, the human ideal of devotion, righteousness, and manliness, had slain for plotting harm against his beloved Sita.

"Ripe for the taking too," he tongued in her ear.

Bells and flutes and drums piped melodic from his throat, and his hands danced upon her.

Harini screamed at the sight of her flesh, red as if powdered with cinnabar, and of the demon king’s talons razing it away. Beneath her red flesh, bones of crystal sparkled.

"Ripe red fruit of your womb." Ravana vivisected her belly, and her womanly innards fell into his hands.

"Why do I keep coming undone?" she begged of the sky, of the clouds with the monkey-face of Hanuman.

The Monkey God wrested himself from the Ocean of Milk, trundled to the earth, and spoke with the rumbling of volcanic mountains:

"As Brahma said, life is but a dream, a bubble in the waters..."

And the lifeless apes rose from the river and grappled her royal-red limbs and dragged her into the bowels of the Earth Mother.

Beautiful dead as Sita...

...Harini ascended through the quagmire of her mind and woke with dawn’s gilded fingers prying apart her eyelids. Hazy light filled the room, but murky shadows of her dream lurked in the corners untouched by morning. It seemed monkeys waited there. Along the wall, their dark lissome tails reached outward, threatening to strangle her.

Throwing off the duvet, she rolled out of bed and stayed in the path of the light as she made her way to the bathroom.

Cold water on her face startled her fully awake. No simians in the shadows. Nothing but an illusion of her fraught mind.

Life is but a dream, a bubble of water...

"Undone," she said to her dun reflection.

The last month had been harrowing: her catering business failed, her marriage failed, and the landlord handed her the eviction notice yesterday.

"If life is but a dream, then wake me from this nightmare." She sighed as she ran her hands through limp hair, and her breath seemed to twist instead of flow into her lungs. Twisting inside as though the air had changed into hooked knives.

"I love the way your hair smells of ginger...spicy yet sweet..."

An echo of her ex-husband appeared in the mirror, Alex standing behind her, his mouth pressed against her nape, his arms wrapped around her waist. Alex luxuriating in her scent, the aroma of curry and cumin, of jasmine and yogurt, of vanilla and cumquats.

"You spent more time marinating chicken than you did with me, and what have you got to show for it?"

The echo faded with Alex pushing away from her. He had grown disgusted by the smell of her all-consuming and exhausted career and driven into the arms of another woman who perfumed herself with Byblos instead of food spice.

Bowing her head, Harini braced herself against the sink and swallowed the reflux of bile.

"Compose yourself, Harini, for the interview. If a Kshatriya raised himself to Brahman, then you can simply change your luck. Luck, caste, dharma, karma..." She paused as her stomach churned a bubble of acid. "What a fool to think I have any chance of affecting my destiny."

"Souls run like rivers, Harini," her mother had said while massaging almond oil into her skin–-only the softest of skin deserves the god’s fine threads. The skirt-wrap of jonquil silk had hung in front of the window, catching the sweet breeze of the magnolia blooms, waiting in sheer billows for her mother to ready her for its wear.

"Rivers follow their set courses, never changing directions or paths without disaster, until they flow into the oceans and become the ocean."

A halter of jade brocades and spun-gold thread had bejeweled her breasts. She had felt odd in her presenting-costume, as though she were some fairy-like Apsara who would dance upon the river’s water and shake her voluptuous body to entice men.

"Stay your soul toward the Ocean of Milk, toward eternal life."

In her gossamer dress, she had frowned upon her own beauty, upon her mother’s intentions of marrying her off to the most deserving man.

Sighing, Harini ran the water for her shower and stepped into the steam.

She longed for Churu. She missed its semi-arid sandy plain watered only by the Katli River and its rolling hills of sand, its mammoth Ratangarh fort and the grand havelis, and of course its Salasar Balaji, where she had prayed for Lord Balaji to fulfill her desires.

She had desired freedom, an exile from Churu and the dharma manacled to her by tradition.

Spurning an arranged marriage--a good marriage to a wealthy general’s son her mother had begged her to accept–-and enrolling in an American university to study business and culinary arts, Harini brought shame upon her family and herself. A dishonor, a Kshatriya degrading herself to Vaisya.

But she had brought herself even lower, maybe even lower than the Sudras slaves, an untouchable. For she was like them, without a home, without an occupation, and without respect, detested by the people of Churu.

Exile she prayed for, exile Lord Hanuman granted.

Harini twisted the hot water knob and stood in the cold spray, hoping her heart would take the hint and turn as frigid as her flesh. Her breath hitched with a sob. Untouchable, unlovable, unable to get beyond the pain of Alex’s absence. He had waited until she was most vulnerable to hurt her further, knocking her lower than she’d already fallen. Why couldn’t she stop loving someone with such cruelty?

Shivering, she turned off the water and wrapped a towel around her. Only part of her face reflected in the foggy mirror, and she looked away in shock. How closely her eyes resembled the dead apes, round and shadowed with anguish and the grays of death.

The clock in her bedroom chimed seven times.

In fifteen minutes, the car would arrive to take her to her early interview. She hurried dressing, throwing on a long black skirt, cashmere sweater, and tall leather boots, and pulled her damp hair into a knot. She pushed her ornate hair pin through the knot. For luck. It was a gift from her mother long ago, a gold pin with an ebony cameo of Durga, the Earth Mother.

The intercom buzzed incessant like a swarm of angry bees. She grabbed her llama wool coat, rushed out the door, and skipped down the stairs. Out of breath, she exited through the lobby doors and sucked in icicles of December air.

The driver puffed his breath in a grunt of a greeting and opened the door to the town car. His eyes bored into her, hard and cold as the Chicago wind, as she ducked into the back seat. Strange enough for the owner to send a car. Stranger that his driver would regard her with contempt.

Untouchable.

As if he sensed her uneasiness, he grinned before he shut the door. An open mouthed grin of an idiot, a toothless grin of an old man, a tongueless grin of a mute. His mouth was a incarnadine hollow.

Creeps and cold shuddered up her spine.

Baroque music bled through the speakers, an eerie harpsichord rhapsody, and Harini sank against the leather seats, watching the winter-blued world speed by. Snow began to fall beyond the window. Fall like gypsum tears from Indra’s heaven, from the Monkey God who wept for the dead.

Her hope had died, and not even the opportunity to work again raised it. No matter her status, she would forever be untouchable to Alex.

The driver increased the volume, and the speaker at her door vibrated and pulsed the requiem against her flesh.

Music and tears for the dead.

As the car pulled into the parking lot of Ambrosia’s Restaurant, she wondered why she felt it was all for her.

####

He sat at the table, running his finger through the candle’s amber flame, studying the woman across from him.

Snow powdered her dark hair. Sugared cocoa, he thought as he watched the snow dissolve into wet crystals and then into a velveteen shine upon the strands.

Her beauty screamed intoxicating. Especially the way she nervously licked her natural wine-dark lips and the way her bourbon-brown eyes warmed him each time she bothered to glance up from her interlocked fingers.

Those fingers delighted him. Her nails were long, tapered, and polished in concubine-claret, perfect for inflicting passion’s pain.

"Mr. Lewis..."

"Brock, please."

"Do you have any questions about my resume?" she asked, her voice as titillating as an aperitif.

"None. Speaking of food will not satisfy any hunger nor my curiosities. I only require a sampling of you..."

She frowned; a delicate v formed between her downy eyebrows.

"A sample of your creations," he corrected, rising from his chair and motioning her toward the kitchen. "I have everything needed for the works of art."

Miasmic harmony of harps in his head, he lead the way through the swinging doors into the kitchen. She followed with staccato steps.

"Simple yet indulgent," she said, stopping at the island, and a hint of the passion he sensed within her crept into her voice and flushed her cheeks.

Red, the harps played in his vision. Red as passion and hearts aflame. Iron-hot red.

"Indulge me then, prepare a meal fit for the gods."

The wine-dark bow of her mouth curled into an inebriating smile.

How beautiful she is, he thought. How much more beautiful she will become. Exactly the way she should be.

He salivated, not at the prospect of food, but at sating inspiration, of stripping her flesh to reveal its gory-livid layers, of Titian-red arrows driven deep. Cupid’s Mistress.

"You’ll find some exotic meat in the freezer," he directed, and she set off with a sway in her hip, body-poetry in his eye.

And she moved in sweet-flowing tune with his mind’s music.

His muse conducted his hands, and he pulled the bowie knife from the drawer, briefly marveling its glint and sonorous menace before approaching behind her. Swift grasp, his arm locked around her throat and pulled her against him.

She cried in alarm. Honey-toned piping, with none of the lackluster whimpering some women rasped.

Red, his muse harped.

"Yes, cardinal song." His lips grazed the struggling woman’s nape, and his erection pressed against her wriggling backside. "Fly to sleep, my beauty."

Attuned to the red prelude, he plunged the knife through her back. He thrust the blade forward with vigor, piercing her heart, ramming it through her chest. Harps and blood exploded.

####

Sulphur black dreams plagued Harini.

In the utter dark of Indra’s heaven, Hanuman wept once more, and his tears, falling like daggers of foul ice, impaled her. Her chest ached and then went disturbingly numb, as had the rest of her, except her mind. Her mind dreamed on.

Darkness, cold, and the stench of death were her surroundings, and she knew, upon opening her eyes, that she dreamed none of it.

Durga knelt beside her, the Earth Mother’s black fingers digging deep within her and pulling her mucinous intestines out through the rend. Black lips cracked into a rictus grin. More cavity than enamel, her teeth sank into Harini’s intestinal membrane, and the Goddess sucked the noxious fluids from her, emptying her.

Durga opened a vein under her tongue with a raven talon and spat orchid-pink ichor into Harini’s mortal wounds. Harini writhed as the ichor flowed through her veins.

Life is but a dream, a bubble in the waters...

Death is but an end to the dream, the pop of the bubble, and she was finally awake. Dead awake.

Unbearably undead.

Darkness ebbing, Harini shrank from the Earth Mother and the hunger aglow in her eyes. Other things glowed in the infrared light of the freezer-chamber. Things worse than the black Goddess of death.

"My dancers," Durga murmured, leaning close, and her breath smelled chthonic, heavy as if with Churu’s sands and the decay beneath its gritty soil. "All shall rise from the dark waters and dance, and Lord Hanuman shall weep no longer."

"Rise, my little monkeys."

Harini obeyed, as did the others within the icy steel room.

Breaking stiff poses, the others lumbered to their feet, and the frost upon their flesh cracked and crinkled off. They stood anthropomorphic, yet, besides their womanly shapes, little else resembled human.

Vivid colors adorned one. Flesh painted in blue, purple, red, and gold diamonds, the girl appeared as a harlequin. The image continued with her razor-slashed grin which stretched ear-to-ear and the green spikelets of hair topped with brass bells. Fish hooks with bell bait were caught in her fingers and toes, and she jangled when she walked.

Another crawled on the gangrenous stubs of her knees and elbows. Viscous strings of bloody drool hung from her mouth, from the gutted gums and the boar tusks nailed into them.

Called forth by Durga, two more creatures stepped from their spotlighted hovels, doppelgangers of celestial bodies. Polar twins in Harini’s opinion as the star-white and night-black sisters greeted her with their cold lips upon her cheeks. Their perfumes, the astringency of paint and glue and the reek of burnt, blister-charred flesh, embraced her as well.

"We smell your delicious pain. Let us taste it..." they spoke with etheric voices and wrapped frigid limbs around her.

Breaking their bonds, Harini moved away, and their strange eyes followed her.

A corpus puzzle of mangled flesh and wires eased from the darkened corner. Eyelids stitched shut, she saw her way through the eyes imbedded into her palms, breasts and belly button. She grinned at Harini with labial lips.

Last of the lot, a dazzling specimen gathered amongst them, the gold metal of her flesh shiny, the sapphires of her eyes sparking brutality, the rubies of her mouth glimmering with an undefined hunger. Her diamond-hard nails cut through the ice sheath along the walls.

Harini shivered with dread in this edacious company. Karma monsters...

The Earth Mother clapped her ebon-ancient hands and smiled at her daughters borne from death.

"Destroy the demon of man."

Then the Goddess of death left her dead dancers in raptorial wait for his symphony of reedy breath and thrumming blood to enrapture them.

####

Thirteen arrows hung from a line across the kitchen. Striking tips, shafts, and feathers were of the deepest red, as if dipped in slaughterhouse pails, as if shot through cherubs, their white luminescence darkening the rich scarlet splashes of their blood.

By the time he finished flaying the Hindu woman, the paint would have dried, and he could insert them into her. Into the pulse points of her wrists and ankles, into the triangle of her womanhood, the ovaries and uterus, and into her mouth. He would arrow her nipples and eyes.

His muse played fast and furious, and his head ached with her timbre.

Needles, tubes, and hoses went the chorus of his vision.

"Ahhhhh," he moaned, excited beyond words to express his gratitude to his muse. To her unending brilliance.

Distend her belly with gas, mimic the rotundity of Buddha and the bloat of death.

His hands seemed gloved in diaphanous blood, blood of life, blood of death, blood of everlasting art. His hands, his extraordinary hands, had guided her toward enlightenment, toward the ultimate unknown.

"Death," he breathed into his hands, smiling at the warmth of his vitality.

The power of death belonged to every man, but the power of creation belonged to gods. By his will, he would create her in his image. She was already reincarnated in the wheel of his thoughts.

He raised his hands before his eyes, marveling at the perfection of his nimble fingers, at the quiet orchestrated power of god within his palms.

Harp song stirred his soul, and he swayed more than walked toward the freezer. Soul in symphonic ecstacy, he opened the door.

The body was not waiting upon the ground.

She stood in the opening, flesh tinged bluish from cold death, knife wound in sanguineous bloom upon her chest. A certain madness scintillating in her bourbon-drowned eyes.

Confusion riddled him. His mind-maiden screamed a myriad of questions, and the discord and diaphony of his muse’s stridor heightened as the six other pieces of his collection converged out of the shadows.

Seven dead girls walked out of the freezer’s gallery.

"Living art," he said before his throat only issued wails.

Seven pairs of hands, of super extraordinary hands, grappled him and dragged him to the ground. Teeth and tusks and nails and hooks and wires gored into him. His skin shredding like tissue, he writhed in their destructive hands, and his flesh ripped away with the awful sting of whip lashes and scalpel bites. He cried out in shocking agony.

Harps falling silent, he heard their mouths slaver upon his body, their teeth grind and chew his gristle, and their tongues lap noisily with the mingling of their spit with his blood. The ugly wet sounds became frenzied.

He wept in terror.

Burning numbness afflicted him, and his head lulled to the side. In his teary sight, the wooden faces upon the island’s legs came alive as well, and their mouths snapped open and shut with ravening growls. Then his sight was filled with a looming mouth of filed fangs as his black angel of hell-fired flesh raged upon him. She sank her teeth into his face, taking brow, eye, and cheek between her jaws.

She ate away his eyes, his mouth, his screams, his breath.

The reanimated macerated every soft cell in his body, working him apart, de-creating him to bone.

####

His flesh in her mouth, Harini tasted not salty blood nor piquant meat but his experience and essence.

His pain popped hot inside her mouth like raw chili peppers. Fear in his veins rolled sour and sweet all at once along her tongue, snatching her away from this moment to set her down upon another, when she was a child nestled in her mother’s arms and suckling at her breast, the milk flavored as if with lemon yogurt.

Little by little, as his flesh nourished her, her aches faded into a dullness, and she felt almost whole again, almost alive. She ravaged him and fought her fiendish sisters for every scrap. They too craved life, any semblance of it.

Harini tasted the murder in his heart, the bitterness of sage and the fiery strike of cumin seed. His hatred was sticky like anise-rich syrup, and his imagination burst in an array of fascinating aromas and sapors, truly an ambrosial stew.

This she feasted on until her forever-stalled digestive system backed up.

Nothing but bones remained of Brock Lewis, and these the boar-mouthed zombie gnawed on lazily.

Resting against another, Harini listened to the bassoon of necrotic gases churn within her belly and drifted in somnolent satiety, eyelids flickering with the Monkey God’s laughter.

Hanuman expressed his pleasure that the dead macaques had risen from the steps in flames and danced in sultry heat. In the features of the dead monkeys, she saw the hint of all their human faces.

Life is but a dream, a bubble in the waters...

Watery waste expelled from her corpse, and she felt empty, except for the hunger-ache deep and heavy in her. A voracious appetite for flesh and blood, for life, for the sensation of feeling alive again.

They rose, eyes peckish, mouths agape, gluttonous bellies gurgling.

Quivering with the sycophantic smell in the air, Harini led them through the restaurant. She thought of the temple mornings and how the troop of macaques circled the grounds on the hunt for food gifts or chances for thievery. Once, the villagers trapped the brazen monkeys and set them free in the wild, only to find them at the temple months later, patrolling and bullying the streets again as was their way.

As was their way too, hunting for life.

They were but Hanuman’s sacred monkeys, driven from life but returned.

Harini stopped before the office door, inhaling the heady sycophant-sweat, waiting for the others to establish a pecking order. Six tongues licked their ready lips. She broke through the locked door and growled at the driver.

Upon their charge into the room, he gasped empty screams, threw himself at the desk, and pulled a Derringer from the drawer. Unsteady hands took aim.

Deafening clap, acrid smoke, and bullet struck her. Dead center in her forehead.

But Harini was untouchable, didn’t even flinch, and the only falling she did was onto him, with her teeth tearing away the remaining parts of his mouth.

The driver dissatisfied her taste buds. Flesh bland as his mind and flat as his soul, nothing piqued her, and she refused to feed anymore. At least on him.

But Alex, she grinned. Alex enjoyed the arts, enjoyed enriching his soul, his blood, and the dead arts would definitely enjoy him.

6:50 PM - 15 Comments - 14 Kudos - Add Comment

Personal Fav: "Wild Things"
Current mood: artistic
Category: Writing and Poetry

WILD THINGS

by Teri A. Jacobs

(previously published in FLESH & BLOOD MAGAZINE)

            "The Wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved good-bye..."
            The pages of Where The Wild Things Are turned without finger or wind, and the susurrous voice of dust read the words.  Spiders and silverfish dropped dead from the attic rafters and walls, falling in a soft patter of applause.
            In the far corner, veiled in shadows, a forgotten collection of meteorite fragments slid inside their box and snapped together.  A lithic key formed.  And the mysterious hand of deep space and time fitted the key, with its teeth of shining pyroxene, into a hole of darkness, unlocked the dreams and imaginations of those sleeping below and opened up another world...
####
            Russell smoothed Owen's nightmare-damp brow.
            "I dreamed about her again," Owen whispered, his tiny fists clenching the blanket beneath his chin, his gray eyes round and glistening with unshed tears.
                "Ssshhhh..."  Russell kissed the top of his seven year-old's head, the salt of his sweat and terror on his lips, in his nose.  His dream-incited fever warmed the air about his slight body like some humid aura.
            "But it wasn't like a dream at all, Daddy.  Mommy walked into my room, with dirt on her feet and hands, and in her hair and even inside her mouth.  She touched me here."  Owen pointed to his nose.  "And I felt it.  I think Mommy really dug out of her grave this time."
            "No, Owen.  Mommy's never coming back."  Russell pulled his son against him, and, in the tight cradle of his bulky arms, rocked his small body.  Owen wept, soundless, his whole body shaking, wracked in a grief Russell felt powerless to suppress or soothe, in a grief Russell understood all too well.  Eyes squeezed shut, tension of tears dampened, he held onto Owen.  His only lifeline after Karen died.
             After a while, after an exhaustion of tears, Owen fell asleep in his arms, but Russell was reluctant to release him, always terrified of letting him go and never having him back.  Like Karen, who had smiled sleepily at him, that alluring afterglow of their lovemaking on her cheeks and in her eyes, before she had closed her eyes forever.  She had an aneurysm in her sleep.  He had awakened though, with his arms around her still warm and supple body, unaware of her passing, trying for some ill-forgotten time to rouse her.  The moment he had realized something was terribly wrong was the moment he had lost his mind.
            And Owen had stood there in the doorway, watching his world fall maddeningly apart.
            Russell slipped his arms from Owen, laid him gently on the bed, and tucked him in beneath the blankets.  He looked upon his son with a pang of regret in his heart.  Peace and innocence buried along with his mother, Owen no longer slept with the softened angelic features which once had Russell melting in love.  Pain shadowed his face now, his face but a dark reflection of the ghastly dreams within him.

 Something else left a shadow on his face though.
                Something too much like a dirty fingertip.
            His heart hammering away, Russell reached down and wiped away the faint smudge from his son's nose.  Owen stirred and murmured, "Mommy."   
            Footfall noises clomped upon the ceiling.  He sprang from Owen's bedside and followed the sounds with his eyes, sounds which roved from corner to corner as if an intruder paced in the attic. 
            On impulse, Russell grabbed the little league bat and locked the door behind him as he headed toward the attic stairwell.  Laughter tinkled through the darkness.  Laughter he recognized, loved and missed.  His hand trembled toward the light switch, and he hesitated, thinking perhaps it would suit him better to keep things in the dark, hidden from sight.  He held his breath and flipped the switch.
            Light burned his nighttime eyes, and Russell blinked in the glare, fearing every moment his eyes opened that she would stand before him, her graven face inches before his.  But he saw only a dirt-strewn path going up and down the stairs.  A path left by his dead wife, the shape of the footprints exactly like the ones Karen had sunk into sands, the mark of slender heel and toes, the middle missing because of her high arch. 
            Mommy's never coming back. 
            But she had.
            Russell climbed the stairs, the cold grains of cemetery soil crumbling beneath his bare feet, the cold fear roiling through his veins.  The laughter faded into sepulchral sighs.  Knuckles aching as he gripped the bat tighter and tighter, he halted before the door and pressed his ear upon the panel.  Such silence behind the door, ominous as if a predator waited with muscles coiled for that mortal spring.
             One, two, three, he counted in his mind, reverting to his steeling tool of childhood days of dares, when he would jump from the top of stairs or the highest point of the swing, when he would stick his fingers in snake holes, mud wasp hives, or between the chain links which fenced in the Doberman. 
            And he swung the door open.
            And stared.
            And gawped.
            Behind the door, the attic as he knew it had disappeared.  The walls of plywood and stud planks and the pine floor had changed.  Root tendrils veined every inch of the walls and hung from the steep-angled ceiling, dripping coppery sap.  Mushrooms with caps of pink-moist flesh and chartreuse puss-radiant vines grew from the dark decay-rich ground that replaced the floor.  Worse, the room seemed to exist without boundary, going on and on into a death-realm darkness which breathed, those chthonic winds blowing pages of his child's book around, rushing the picture of a little boy in a wolf suit upon him and whispering I'll eat you up... 
            Russell closed the door.  Shivers down his spine, he turned back, headed down the stairs, and shuffled into his bedroom.  He flopped onto the bed, settling stiff on his back, with his eyes fixed upon the swirling plaster of the ceiling, waiting to wake from this disturbing dream.
            Waiting and waiting, while phantasms with weight thudded above him in malicious pandemonium. 
            He groaned and rubbed his eyes, his temples, the crown of his head, wishing that all that noise, those skittering whispers and wolfish cries would hush, wishing that Karen had never died and shattered his reality in the first place.
            Her disembodied laughter echoed again.  It drew him from the bed, into the hallway, and up the stairs, drew him forward as the moon drew tides from the sea.   As if magnetized, his hand shot against the doorknob.  Russell turned it without delay, thought or care, taking the dare carried along by strange winds and voices, and nudged the door open with the bat.  He stepped inside.  He stepped further and further, reeling with the putrescent sink of the ground beneath his feet and the chilling plop-plop of visceral amber on his face.  Upon a backward glance, he watched the doorway diminish into a pinpoint of light and then blink away.
             Darkness was not an absolute.  Metallic-onyx mists cast everything in a macabre shimmer, of midnight and moonlight on tombstone-shaded snow, of abandoned and haunted silver mines, the twinkle against the dark granite chips of precious metal and tongue-polished bone.  His imagination played tricks in this dark wraithlike lumen.  Instead of root tips above his head, slaughtered bodies hung by the ankles, throats slit, abdomens gutted, their fluids draining down, their organs fallen and forming a slimy and pulpy path below.  Slaughtered bodies that suddenly swung, wet limbs slapping against him and knocking the bat from his hand.  Slaughtered bodies that suddenly screamed.
                Russell's own screams pierced the canopy.
            From the stalactites of roots, ebon banshees dropped by the hundreds, dwarfish man-monkey breeds, eyeless, hairless, with lipless mouths baring the sharpest teeth.  The hundreds of shrieking creatures launched toward him, swift-loping on feet and knuckles, snapping those sharp, sharp teeth.
            Russell ran, ran as fast as his feet could cut through the bulbous and tangled growth.  Which wasn't near fast enough.
            The black fiends ripped into his ankles, calves, thighs, pulling him down onto the ground.  He landed on his face.  He snuffed in the dirt, in the detritus of the dead.  That odor, unaltered and strong as road-kill on a summer simmering road.
                Thousands upon thousands of padded fingers rolled him onto his back, and hundreds upon hundreds of night-terror faces leaned into him.  Other smells struck him.  Excrement.  Blood.  The foul florid exhale of shit feeding carnivores.
            In a cacophony of hoots and howls, shrieks and shrills, the man-monkeys converged upon him, their lipless mouths wide, wide and widening.  Then it was only teeth hailing upon him. 
            Russell threw his arms across his face, protecting his eyes, and twisted and kicked uselessly as the bites seized his soft flesh.  Sharp teeth nipped and gnawed, shredded and tore his skin.  Such places, like his thighs and abdomen, suffered deeper ravaging, the marbled meat of muscles and fat broken into.  He wailed in agony.  His body burned, third-degree excruciating and feeling as if all his raw blood-bubbly flesh were being stripped off.
            Shock stole his mind away.  Memories like snapshots flipped inside him, all the people of his life two-dimensional, smiling, and parading without animation, frames of his wife and son as numerous as the teeth.  But then darkness replaced his memories and filled his head with her laughter...
####
            Eyelids fluttering, Russell came out of the darkness and into the blinding pain.  Winds buffeted against him, stinging and needling into his wounds which was his flesh, crimson and seeping.  His head lolled as if barely attached.  His body hung limp, and his feet thumped and thudded along the ground, along ground littered with the battered bodies of the man-monkeys.
                Something held his wrists together with one massive hand and dragged him behind it, all the while cackling hideously, reminding him of an opportunist hyena carting off another predator's kill.
            In dread, he watched the mangle of discarded meat dwindle into the distance and knew without a doubt, his body too injured and weakened for a fight, he would be eaten alive. I'll eat you up...
            Nothing more horrible, he shuddered and winced as the wind snickered and sipped into his gaping sores.
                Scorpioid insects burrowed from the ground.  Some combination of beetle and scorpion, with iridescent segmented shells, sickle shape-and-sharp horns, pincer claws, and erectile tails with venomous stingers.  The Scorpio-beetles scurried after him, feeding upon the bits of grume and gore trailing him.
            He turned his head from the following feasters.  Several feet from him stretched a wondrous lake, frozen solid despite the heat, sparkling with the reflection of the pale azure sun like some humongous gem.  But, beneath the pretty surface, blued amphibious bodies were suspended in the ice, many, many eyes pinned on the rictus hunt, capacious mouths in the stasis of attack.  Russell feared swimming in that thaw.
            Further ahead, beached on the shore, one of the alien amphibian dead had defrosted.  The heat had melted the ice, ice which had expanded and exploded the cells, rendering it into an amorphous being, its tissues turned to cyanic slush.
            Birds peppered the ground, hopped toward the carcass, and, with butterfly syphons, sucked up the nectarous remains.
            In the ecru sands beyond the carrion, Russell spied the footprints of his dead wife.  Steps going round and round and round, like her laughter going round and round and round in his head, making him dizzy and delirious.
            His captor dropped him.  Sands made shards of glass in his inflamed wounds, and he cried out, the first sign he gave of life.  Russell cried out again when his captor came into view.  Ogrish, gigantic, covered with the bristled hair of a boar, human contours of body and face, but with the teeth and claws of prehistoric beasts.
            Six other ogres grunted, their meal disturbed.  Heaped between them was another ogre, dead, murdered, its monstrous face hit with some weapon, rock, club, powerful fist, and shattered.  The tip of a claw proved an apt scalpel, vivisecting the chest and revealing a cannibal bounty of meat and viscera.
            But the giants stared at Russell with greedy eyes.  Fresh and tender meat, he read in those black-iris eyes.  We'll eat you up.
            Seven ogres surrounded him, with their claws and teeth in vicious glinting spread.
                "Daddy?"
            Eight heads swiveled in the direction of the small whimpering voice.
            Owen stood trembling, his pajama bottoms sopping and stuck against him, watching again his world fall maddeningly apart.
            "I heard Mommy ..." his childish voice explained, faltered, as the ogres moved from Russell toward Owen, the most tender of all.
            Russell couldn't scream, his terror too great for his voice to handle, and then he discovered there was something worse than being eaten alive.
####

9:03 AM - 10 Comments - 11 Kudos - Add Comment

short story--Hideous Beauty

HIDEOUS BEAUTY

1:42 PM - 7 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

short story--The Harlequin
Current mood: amused

THE HARLEQUIN by Teri A. Jacobs

6:24 PM - 8 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment

Secrets of the Bones, excerpt
Current mood: artistic

Secrets of the Bones
(available March 2005, Prime Books, www.shocklines.com)


CHAPTER ONE:


“That the sons of God saw the daughters
of men were fair; and they took them wives of
all which they chose.”
Genesis 6.2

“There were giants in the earth in those
days; and also after that, when the sons of God
came in unto the daughters of men,
and they bare children to them, the same
became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”
Genesis 6.4


“These are the Grigori, who with their prince
Satanail rejected the Lord of light...”
Book Of Enoch, XVIII




I.

The smell of suffering summoned them from the darkness.

From the dark of their prisons beneath the heavens, beneath the worlds, beneath the hells...

Quivering, stinking flesh of the wretched awoke their hungers, hungers deeper than the abyss, and drew them out of their silence and their pity. After centuries of chained unrest and torment, they escaped.

The Fallen crept through torturous chasms and entered into the world.

Ravenous.

II.
Midnight in winter was her hour of sorrow, the time of black reflections and cold silence, the only time she allowed the tears. Tears for her child taken from this world during some other winter, some other midnight.

Aimless, Rani walked the near-empty streets and wept. The wind carried awful tones through the alleys, reminding her too much of her son’s murderer when he pressed his mouth against her ear. His blood-hot words had awaken her from sleep, only to bring her into a nightmare.

“Little Boy Blue asleep in the hay, blue-black bruises around his throat, never to wake another day.”

And then his murderer had disappeared, literally, as if he’d walked through a door made of the air. But this fact didn’t shock her, not after all the strange she’d witnessed and experienced. What had rattled her was that he was invisible, unknowable, invincible, and left no evidence behind, except a corpse in the crib.

Her son, her little Stephan.

Her little boy blue.

She shrieked into the wind.

The homeless, lost in their own despair, ignored her, looking beyond her as if she were an apparition. She passed them like a bad memory.

Turning off Broadway, Rani left their haunted faces behind. If only it could be so easy, she thought, simply turning a corner to change her fate, but her life went from one bad direction to another. At the end of her road, only monsters ever waited.

26th Street seemed a different world, darker, colder, the realm of the dead perhaps, with its cemetery quiet and vapors. Steam hissed from the vents, rising from the subterranean tunnels like souls escaping from Hell, enveloping her as she crossed over a vent.

The damned have warm hands, Rani thought and shivered. Warm hands, cold hearts. The hearts of thieves, liars, and killers of young boys.

Beneath her boots, the sidewalk squares became gravestone plaques, and every one bore her son’s name, Stephan, in baby blue blood.

The clack, clack of her heels reminded her too much of his small bones breaking, crushed by the monster that still stalked the winter nights, and she stopped.

A black church loomed beside her.

Bells rung by the wind called her in for a blacker mass.

The red-lit stares in the courtyard belonged to the rats, but other things waited on the slate roof and watched with red-hot eyes, a hideous audience silently cheering for her to enter the church.

III.

They saw her without skin.

Beautiful, her raw meat of muscle, sinew, and fat, the tempting organs and bone hidden as if within wraps of scarlet and white silk.

Sweet, earthy, the odor of her aching womb drifted up toward them. Winds ripe with her scent wrapped around their heads, in memories of the daughters of men and their lithe legs parted and clasping. On their split tongues, the virginal taste of the daughters of men lingered still.

The smells of fornication dragged them into the unhallowed church, and, in the shadowy vaults of the ceiling, they prayed for the sacrifice of her body and her blood.

IV.

Rani opened the iron gate. The rusty hinges greeted her with a screech, and the rats scurried noisily across the pavement and into the storm drain. An eerie welcome.

The brown-black silhouette of the Gothic church was foreboding with its spires and tower. Over time, the stones had breathed Manhattan’s polluted air and absorbed this necrotic hue, and, even though she restored historic architecture for a living, she decided she liked the untouched character of the church. An ominous, brooding relic of disrepair, a symbol of disintegrating faith.

Rounding the transept, she noted the nave’s grisaille windows were intact. She reached and touched the glass, her fingertips gliding on cold darkness until faint buttery light flickered within like fire beneath her fingers.

Come to light, come to death murmured the voice within the stones. The voice of midnight and winter and murder.

Rani withdrew her trembling hand.

The stones snarled.

Behind her, the click of claws and feral growls of dogs.

She turned and gaped. These dogs were larger than wolves, with red-matted fur and red-glowing eyes. In their massive jaws, the beasts held skulls.

Misshapen, infantile skulls dripping blood and wailing as if with the voice of her dead son.

She screamed, and her screams silenced the phantom cries but not the laughter coming from the stones, from the shadows behind her.

Hands clasped the sides of her head and held her skull.

Smoky breath enveloped her, and her attacker whispered into her ear, “Where is your Little Boy Blue?”

Thumbnails pressed into her nape.

“His soul waits in darkness, in agony. He cries for you–-don’t you hear him crying for you?”

Yowling winds rushed between the buildings, and her son’s cries echoed in the eaves, the terrified cry of his birth and his death. The wracked cry of her nightmares. The grim herald of the season of death, which had her wandering the streets at midnight.

Tears for Stephan fell.

“Come to light, come to death, and we will release his soul.”

The vise of his hands vanished, and Rani was left standing alone, shaking, straining to follow the sound of his footfalls. But there was none, only his cold laughter in the dark stones.

As if listening to the calls of their master, the dogs turned ears to the winds and whined. They retreated into the streets with the skulls wailing between their jaws, sirens fading into the distance.

His soul waits in darkness, in agony.

The church groaned with the tones of anguished prayers as heavy walls settled on old foundation, and Rani felt drawn toward it. Toward the somber sighs of a dying heart.

Come to light, come to death.

Her heels hit hollow on the steps like hammers against empty skulls, like the sound of her dreams, where men built buildings from bone. The sepulchral sounds ushered her inside.

Inside, where a sanctuary of bodily incense, dim golden glows, and the sharp hymn of whips against flesh welcomed her.

Crimson drugget led from the vestibule to the black-velvet screen before the tribune. She walked up the aisle, feeling anxious as the thud-crack of whips intensified, feeling dread as the sensation of being watched descended upon her.

The central nave and radiating chapels were devoid of pews and people. Still, she felt prying eyes and searched the triforium, arcades, and ceiling, somehow believing something lurked in the arches, pillars, and vaults.

Only shadows cast from candlelight wavered along the intricate marble ceiling.

Shadows of dogs quarreling over bones.

Rani inhaled the strange odors of wax and wounds and burning myrrh.

Behind the screen, she spied their strange sources.

A black-vinyl-clad beauty tipped flaming candles over the naked woman kneeling on the steps in front of her, the red-hot wax streaming down and hardening like clotted blood on the ropes binding her wrists, her ankles, and her breasts. The tortured girl hissed for more.

Another woman, in stiletto boots and PVC gown, had her worshiper on his hands and knees, his bare ass rosy like communal wine. Others waited in breathless circles for their taste of her flogger.

At the altar, one man punished another servant of pain, while others masturbated to the rhythms of her cries.

Rani flinched with the swoosh and swap of the cane as it struck the woman’s red-welted bottom.

Sweat, tears, and delirious bliss glistened on the woman’s face, and her eyes were soft and unfocused, her sight seemingly turned inward on the enthralling ecstacy of pain. Anticipating the cane, she held her breath and swirled her hips slightly. Waiting and wanting...

The cane stung her flesh. Again and again, and her flesh sighed apart in red weeping lines.

And her rhythmic cries touched Rani, touched deep like groping fingers into her open sex.

Enthralled herself, Rani was unaware of the growing stench of burning myrrh and of the nearing presence of those who wore that stench as their perfume.
Unaware until blackish smoke lashed down onto the men.

Unaware until the men howled and crawled away from the altar like beaten dogs, their backs slathered with cuts spitting bloody froth and pus.

Unaware until the smoke became grotesque pillars of men and came onto her with talons and ripping teeth.

CHAPTER TWO:


...angel as you are, that insect lives in you too,
and will stir a tempest in your blood.
Tempests, because sensual lust is tempest–-
worse than a tempest!
Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov

A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.
Hunt, Letter to Alexander Ireland


Talons and ripping teeth.

Her skin, their canvas for splattering art.

Her body was hurled upon the altar and surrounded by things in the vestments of otherworldly flesh.

Hands, inhuman, maleficent, and scorching, burned upon Rani, and her clothes fell in ashes beneath her. Her skin reddened in deep degrees until blisters pearled and popped in rankled ooze. The unearthly men licked them with languid sighs.

Their tongues, stroking velvet and shredding thorns against her broken skin, orchestrated her pain. Her voice split her throat in volumes, an organ piping high and piercing.

Cutting along her abdomen, tracing the slats of her ribs, the curves of her breasts, the circles of her nipples, their tongues made ducts from which they lapped with sanguine greed.

“Milk,” the myriad of unearthly mouths hummed.

“The milk of Asherah, the Mother of God and of the sons of God.”

“The rich milk of her sweet, lurid womb and the waste she birthed.”

Sickened by the sucking sounds of their blood-milking, Rani swooned into delirium, into ruddy darkness filled with wolves and the howling bones of the dead, where soft fetal bones harangued her for marrow and milk.

Unsavory, the taste of uterine water in her mouth. Salty and pissy.

Upon the ceiling, shadows moved like spiders on webs wove of tierceron ribs and rose tracery and dangled above their prey.

Waiting, wanting...

Her body ached, an ache bordering on brutal euphoria, as their mouths softly kissed her labia, as their tongues razed her clit. Caressed as if by a whole bouquet of blood red roses.

Does it hurt? She had asked, and the Singapore whore who masturbated with a razorblade answered with a teasing grin, not anymore.

Not anymore.

Opiated with endorphins, her blood flowed through shrieking veins, numbing the shrieks as if pounding them into senselessness. She had gone over the threshold of pain into the wasteland of pleasure. Their pricks of tongues drew her to the edge of an excruciating orgasm.

MADNESS, this is MADNESS, her mind screamed as their withered faces withdrew from her lap and regarded her with flaming eyes.

Star-bright eyes, peril eyes.

“Madness,” she mumbled breathy, desperately wanting the madness to bring her to that fatal climax.

Rani arched her back and pushed her swollen, open sore of a clit against the mouth of a nimbus-faced man, who flicked his razor-kiss against her.

The orgasm cut through her, its blades of keen pleasure whirling inside her.

Unbearable pleasure, more intense than the vehement agony of childbirth, gripped every cell in her body, and she couldn’t even scream because of her constricted, convulsing throat. It lasted mere minutes. When it ended, she collapsed, her body rubbery and slick with fervid sweat, her mind reeling between heaven and hell.

The creatures from either heaven or hell stood around her, with white wings fanned and tattered, with skin blushed with the light of dawn, with melancholy faces bowed.

“We are the Grigori,” she heard in the dreary song of their telepathic, celestial voices.

Unknown winds stirred from the sacristy, bringing the stale dust of the Eucharist and the mournful cries of infants.

“We come for our sons born and slaughtered.”

Rani trembled in fear, for their faces suddenly stormed into turmoil, ashen ovals wet with tears made from lightning. The Grigori fashioned swords from their falling tears and brandished the bright blazing steel before her, pointing them at her eyes, mouth, and pubic mound.

“We come for our sons waiting and unmade.”

Then she succumbed to another onslaught of vicious rapture.

Azure-burning hands spread her arms and legs, opening her body to them. Between her legs, her own heat warmed the air with wanton perfume. Star-bright eyes glowed brighter with hellish fires as the Grigori savored the scent of her arousal.

And theirs, like jasmine, intoxicated her, giving her drunken hallucinations of Sodom, of lush bodies making ardent, adulterous love in the flowers and flames.

Swords gored into her sides and thighs.

Spears of their sublime cocks thrust into the blood-wet slit of her wounds.

Glorious pain, her body afire as if in the embrace of the sun. Burning in lust beyond human feeling. This must be Elysium, her mind and body sighed as the fallen angels ravaged her.

In her ear, one of the Grigori whispered his name, Shemyaza, and her raging heartbeat quivered into a murmur. Her breath silenced. Her womb though yearned for more than his voice inside her.

And this he knew and complied, ripping into her in one fell thrust, splitting her man-made cunt with his god-almighty cock.

Her eyes rolled back. Cold sweat mixed with the dew of the warm blood on her skin, making her body super slick on the altar. Rani slid into his thrusts. Crying out, she felt gutted as his huge cock rammed deeper than humanly possible, striking into the core of her body. Into the core of pleasure itself.

Hyperventilating now with his fast and furious rhythm, she rode the fire-cracking fuck and swore she’d pass out from this awesome feeling building and building within her. It threatened. Rani wondered if her body would literally explode, all her juicy sex coming strewn apart and wet-spotting every inch of the walls.

Moments of blackness took her. And then she came. Soul-shuddering hard.

Shemyaza withdrew from her, with his cock still twitching and spilling clouds of white upon her. Sweet warmth dribbled onto her mouth, and Rani tasted not only honey in his seed but Paradise.

But, in the aftertaste, came the bitterness of his exile from God’s Kingdom, his punishment for fathering ogrish sons who devoured the men and beasts of earth.

As she lay shivering in shock and ambrosial satiety, the fallen angels licked her wounds, healing the flesh again, sealing them without the trace of even the faintest silvery scar.

Rising on the altar, she sat as if on a throne, her imperial guards at her sides, her subjects fawning.

Shemyaza placed his flaming fingers against her forehead. His perilous eyes bore into her.

“We are the Watchers.”

“We are the Keepers.”

Candlelight faded flame by flame. The Grigori disappeared into the darkness, the hint of burning myrrh left behind, but Rani felt them from afar, watching, waiting, wanting.

And she knew they were watching for signs of sons growing within her.

6:47 AM - 6 Comments - 11 Kudos - Add Comment

Short story--Masque Macabre

MASQUE MACABRE
(previously published in HORROR GARAGE)



And pomp, and feast, and revelry,
With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Milton, L’Allegro





Thunder rumbled the bruised sky, echoic of the restless dead. The drumming came deep and desperate as if countless rotting hands pounded against coffin and crypt. Louder, ever louder, the percussive blows resounded, the muffle of putrid flesh destroyed. Now--solid fists of bone rapped the ghastly rhythm with more force.

Adélie hearkened to the wail of wretched voices lifting in the wind. Grimly attuned, she felt their despair as cold and unrelenting as the rain.

With a fury-flash of lightning, the ancestral cemetery was revealed, all silver, grey and bone, at the edge of the estate. Shadowy flutters harangued the headstones. Adélie shuddered, envisioning the swirling violet-black iris petals as starving ravens in search of flesh, as walcryies, corpse-eaters arrayed in lustrous onyx feathers, coming for the dead.

The carrion garden flickered in a final display of hoary slashes then shrouded itself again with dark. In the light of her imagination, she still saw the sodden ground offering its raven-feeders, its gross-dripping bounty of decay.

Adélie pulled the windows shut on the sluicing feast and carelessly dried her arms on the hangings of velours noir. But the whimpering cadence of the dead seeped in through the glass and misted her wounded skin with miasmic tears. She felt sickly damp and chilled as if touched, beseeched, by long-embalmed hands.

“Hush,” she whispered, bowing her head in reverence, in acquiescence. “The psychopomp shall come.”

Resting her cheek against the pane, Adélie wept for the hrafengrennir, the unclaimed dead, as omens rent the air. Crack of swords and skeletons, of skulls splitting in shrieks and groans, of death grinding bodies into dust over and over, again and again.

The night pulsed with haunting tones and mad music. In the hall the ancient clock chimed midnight—the darkest hour, which sang of the wolf, the witch and the ghost—and heralded that black-shining moment of transcendence, when reality became dream and nightmare.

The twelfth hour was Adélie’s. At midnight she masqueraded in another face, as another person, in another world--transforming the harsh ugly truth of life for a spell. At midnight there were no scars, no pain, no cowering fears, no crippling dread so much darker than the darkest hour.

The last of the tolls faded away. She shifted from the window and prepared her costume. She plunged her hands into liquid color, tepid and mucky as visceral wastes. Smoothing the Cimmerian shades onto her body, she languidly caressed them into her skin, then slipped into her elaborate fan of iridescent ebon wings. She donned a mask selected from the many hanging on the walls--totems of slain valiants, puissant demons, discarded deities.

What god resided in the mask? What spirit would possess its wearer? Adélie wondered as she adjusted the mask, as she adorned herself in dark mystery.

Old blood speckled the mirror, but she admired her beauty nonetheless. Black leather masked her brow, eyes, nose and cheeks, strangely crowning her head with the twists and branches of scarlet-veined cornute forms. Her eyes were tricked malicious red, her salacious lips lined with black and glistening with a shade as bright as fresh spilled blood.

Adélie was midnight’s spirit–dark and foreboding, dread and potent in her destiny.
....

In the ballroom, gilde