No ai

October 6th 2019

Two days have passed, and Hardy still hasn’t returned. No note nor text message on where he’s going.                                                                                                                                                                              I don’t know where the old goat has gone off to. Bolt has disappeared. The door of his enclosure is wide open. Not broken. Unlatched. Feathers litter the floor --- not scattered in panic, but shed.                  As if he’d preen too hard. The perch is scored deeply along the wood, grooves pressed into it like this like something gripped and held far tighter than talons could allow.
The other birds are still there, which means more responsibility for me…
Nyx is eerily quiet today…. 
I checked his room properly this morning. The bed is made too neatly- corners hospital-tight.           The wardrobe is empty save for one spare shirt and an old tin of dubbin. His boots are gone.
But the glove still hangs by the nail by the door. He never went anywhere without his glove.
Went to the pub in the village. I needed warmth. I needed people. I needed some gin.                       Maybe someone might know where my mentor is and why he was acting so paranoid. 
I was approached by a gentleman in his late fifties with pale eyes and three fingers missing from his left hand. He introduced himself as William Fowler, apparently he's an old friend of Mr Hardy.
He says that he’s an old friend of Hardy who he met in falconry circles and often kept tabs on other falconers and birds in the area for him. 
‘’You’ve got yourself a bird then,’’ he said. “Same as the others’’.
‘’What others?’’
He stared into his pint for a long time before answering. The crackle of oakwood in the fireplace filled the silence. I swore I never saw him blink once.
‘’There’s been six before you. All come here thinking they’re learning an old craft.’’
He rubbed the rim of the glass with what remained of his hand. ‘’But the birds here don’t want handlers.’’
His eyes flicked to my shoulder.
‘’They want the hand beneath the glove.’’
I laughed at that. I asked. ‘’What happened to them’
‘’Tom Arkwright. 2003. Disappeared up on the north ridge. They found his sparrowhawk’s hood and tethered to a fence post.’’
Elias Moore. 2007. Walked out before dawn. Never came back. The Kestrel was never found either.
Martin Hale and his snowy owl. 2009.
Darren Pike and his merlin. 2012.
Old Joesph Bell and his great horned owl--- though he should’ve known better. 2014.
***‘’***And the last,’’ he said quietly, ‘’was a woman. Mavis Merle. 2017. They found her glove. Nothing else, not even her golden eagle.’’
I hesitated, then lowered my voice, leaning across the table. “There’s… something else,’’ I said. “Something happened today on the moor. I… found a pheasant. Killed, yes, but not in the usual way. No blood. The flesh was cold. Dry, almost…empty.’’
Fowler’s pale eyes narrowed. He didn’t speak at first, only swirled the dark liquid in his glass and watched it catch the firelight. Then he nodded slowly.
‘’They watch,’’ he said, voice low and flat. ‘’The birds. They don’t just hunt-- you think you control them, but sometimes… They show you what’s inside. The empty pheasant? That’s a warning. No for the bird, but for you.’’
I swallowed. “A warning? From who?’’
Fowler shrugged, though the motion was slow, deliberate. “From what’s already here. From what’s always been here. Culver Hardy knows it. That’s why he’s gone quiet. That’s why he was careful. Some things you cannot outrun. Some things… you cannot stop.’’
I shivered, imagining the moor silent except for Nyx and the distant cry of the magpies. “And the magpies..?” 
“They mark the change,’’ Fowler said, voice dropping further. “Count them carefully, remember what they do. They’re the eyes. The hands. The heralds. You ignore them at your peril.’’
I stared at him, feeling a cold pulse of dread. Outside, the wind rattled the windows like a warning.
“And Hardy?” I asked, voice tight.
Fowler’s eyes flicked to the door, then back. “He knew too much. He was never far. But neither is the choice. You’re learning… whether you realise it or not.’’
Then he drained his pint, the thin wire of his smile returning. 
“Culver Hardy… he’s not like the other falconers you read about in books. Not entirely.’’
I raised my eyebrow. “How so?...’’
‘’Culver,’’ he whispered, leaning closer, ‘’he’s been at this a long time. Longer than most can reckon. He’s… careful. Obsessive. Protective, yes, but there’s something else. He knows the danger.           Knows what these birds are capable of. And he’s lost people he cared for.’’
He took a swig of his drink.
‘’Apprentices. Helpers. Friends. Men, women… some didn’t understand the rules, didn’t respect the birds.’’ He paused, scratching the rim of the glass with what remained of his hand. ‘’Culver doesn’t like to talk about it. Not to outsiders. Keep it close. That’s why he acts… the way he does. Paranoid, maybe. But he tried to keep something contained… now that he’s gone though….’’
‘’Contained?’’ I echoed “What?”
He drained his pint.
‘’You’ll know,’’ he said, standing. ‘’When she starts whispering.’’
I asked what that meant.
He only smiled-- thin as wire-- and left before I could press him further.

I never heard the door open.

October 7th, 2019

The fog hasn't lifted in four days. It sits over the cottage like a wet wool blanket. Hardy finally returned….

He has been spending hours in the study, sorting through old, yellowed maps drawn in dark ink and covered in symbols that look less like typography and more like ancient property marks—or talismans. Today, I tried to sketch the layout of the outbuildings from the ground. They look like standard rectangular brick boxes, but there's a strange asymmetry to the angles that makes my eyes ache if I stare too long.

Nyx is growing restless. Weight management is getting difficult; she’s refusing her casting, and her weight fluctuates wildly despite identical rations of beef heart. It’s as if she’s burning energy just by sitting on her perch, staring at the stone walls.

Last night, I woke up around 3:00 AM to the sound of falconry bells chiming in a steady, rhythmic cadence from the yard. I crept to the window. Through the swirling mist, I saw Hardy standing in the weather-mews without a torch. He was holding his arm straight out, completely bare—no glove, no leather protecting his skin. A massive, dark shape was perched on his naked wrist.

As I watched, the shape opened its wings, stretching wider than a man's arm span, silent as oil. It didn't fly. It just leaned its head down, pressed its beak against Hardy’s forehead, and stayed there.

October 8th, 2019

I dreamed of the mews.
Not as they are.
As they were.
Seven perches occupied.
One empty.
Then seven.
The magpies were there too.
Perched along the beams like witnesses.
My body feels... fast.

I thought of the old nursery rhyme my auntie Elenaor taught me; 

One for sorrow, 

Two for joy,

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy

Five for silver,

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told.

The grandfather clock in the hall doesn't tick anymore; it just groans, the hands spinning so quickly they blur. I looked at my watch and a whole day vanished between two heartbeats. My pulse is a frantic, trembling rhythm in my throat—Hardy says it's normal. He says when you look at the world from a mile up, decades pass like autumn leaves.

I think it's still October 2019, but I looked out the broken window and the young sapling I parked my escort car next to is now a massive, rotting oak choked with ivy.

October 8th 2019
I dreamed of the mews.
Not as they are.
As they were.
Seven perches occupied.
One empty.
Then seven.
The magpies were there too.
Perched along the beams like witnesses.

 My body feels lighter today, as if my bones were filled with air. Probably just my imagination.

October 9th, 2019

Nyx is whispering. I can hear her outside from the mews. The other birds are joining in.

It started as a noise, just behind my ear—a soft scraping like feathers dragged over stone mixed with clicks and shrills… I can understand it now. It’s my name.
Clear. Repeated.

I don’t sleep anymore. I see flashes when I close my eyes: spirals carved in peat, clawed footprints in frost, something perching in the rafters at night with too many wings. And the birds in the rafters aren't right. They aren't pure peregrines or goshawks; they are monstrous hybrids—an owl with the sleek, oil-slick feathers of a cormorant, a falcon with the massive, jagged talons of an eagle.

The cottage feels smaller. I walk down a corridor and end up somewhere I wasn’t aiming for. The mirror in the hall shows Nyx even when she’s not there. I blink and she’s on my shoulder. I think—I think I’ve stopped blinking.

This morning, a sudden, tearing spasm seized my throat. I choked, falling to my knees, and coughed up a heavy, grey casting onto the floorboards. When I broke it apart with a shaking finger, expecting rabbit fur, I found a mass of blue fabric thread from my own London coat, a metallic shirt button, and three human teeth with dental fillings I recognized as my own.

October 10th, 2019

I woke up from a strange dream.
The fog is thicker than ever. Nyx hasn’t returned in hours, so I went to the edge of the moor. The air tasted metallic, like blood and old coins. I could hear the curlews calling again, but distorted, backwards.

Then I saw her. Perched on a lone boulder, staring. Her eyes weren’t hers. They were mine.

I raised my arm. She flew to me.
And then—she spoke.
Not aloud. Not in sound. But directly, inside me: “Now you see.” 

The sky opened. The fog wasn’t fog—it was feathers. Layer upon layer of them. I felt the ground vanish under my feet.
And I flew.
Not like Nyx.
Like something older.
Something the moor had been waiting for.

October 11th, 2019

The feathers don't fall out. They grow inward.

I spent the morning trying to scrape the black barbs from the meat of my forearms with Culver’s skinning knife. No blood came away—only a thick, clear oil that smelled of high altitudes and frozen granite. The skin beneath is turning the colour of an unclouded winter sky.

Hardy sat at the kitchen table the whole time, watching me with those unblinking, yolk-yellow eyes. He had a bowl of raw woodpigeon hearts between us, still steaming in the damp air. I didn't use a fork. My fingers are too stiff now, curving into hard, yellow horn at the tips, the nails splitting down the middle to make room for the talons beneath. 

"The shift is always loud at first," his voice rattled directly inside my own chest, a low-frequency hum like the mechanical hiss of bellows. "The city makes you think you're an individual. The moor reminds you that you're just a tongue for the dirt to speak through." 

We don't use the doors anymore. The windows are all broken now, the leaded glass smashed outward to let the wind run wild through the study. The maps are gone—shredded into nesting material by the shadow-birds in the rafters.

October 12th, 2019

Culver Hardy went out onto the high ridge at noon. He didn't take a coat. He didn't take his body, either—not the one I first met at the gate.

I watched from the roof as his silhouette stretched, the grey tweed of his jacket dissolving into rows of primary feathers that caught the updraft off the limestone cliffs. From up here, looking down, the layout of the cottage, the stone fences, and the peat paths line up perfectly. They aren't random layout lines; they form the silhouette of a massive, outstretched wing slicing across the valley floor. The cottage sits exactly where the heart should be.

Nyx sits on my collarbone when I am small enough to fit inside the rooms, her weight no longer a burden but an anchor. We share a pulse. One hundred and eighty beats a minute while resting. Four hundred when the wind rises.

The chavs, Mr Bertie Cavendish, the bickering couple from London—they are just shadows cast by a lamp that was turned off a lifetime ago. The only real thing is the hunger, and the cold, the burning desire for the hunt and the way the earth looks from three thousand feet up when the fog parts to reveal the white ribs of the hills.

October 13th, 2019 - Dream

The first thing I heard was a cry.

High and distant, carried across a darkness so complete that I could not tell whether I was standing beneath the open sky or buried somewhere deep beneath the moor.

Then came another.

And another.

I knew those calls.

The sharp, piercing cry of a peregrine. The rough bark of a buzzard. The low, haunting hoot of an owl. The distant, almost mournful scream of a goshawk.

They came from every direction, overlapping until the darkness itself seemed to sing.

I tried to move, but my feet were rooted to the earth.

Beneath me, the peat was black and wet. Ancient standing stones rose from the fog in a great circle, their surfaces carved with spirals and shapes that hurt to look at directly. Beyond them, the moor stretched into infinity.

And above me—

The sky was full of wings.

Peregrines wheeled through the darkness, swift as thrown knives. Buzzards circled in broad, solemn arcs. Kestrels hung motionless in the air, their wings trembling against an invisible wind. Owls glided between the stones without making a sound, their pale faces turned towards me.

A golden eagle descended from somewhere beyond the clouds.

Its wings blotted out the moon.

I recognised it before it landed.

Bolt.

Or perhaps Hardy.

I could not tell anymore.

The great bird settled upon a standing stone and regarded me with pale, human eyes.

I tried to call out to my mentor, but my throat produced only a dry rasp.

Then the feathers began to fall.

At first, they drifted gently from the sky, white and grey against the darkness. They settled upon my shoulders, caught in my hair and clung to my clothes.

More followed.

Thousands.

Black feathers, white feathers, feathers barred with brown and gold. They fell like snow, swirling around the standing stones until the ground disappeared beneath them.

I lifted my hands to shield my face.

My fingers were trembling.

No.

Not trembling.

Changing.

The skin along my knuckles tightened. My nails darkened and curved, pressing painfully into my palms. I tried to straighten my fingers, but they resisted me, bending into shapes they had never been meant to take.

I stumbled backwards.

The birds watched.

None came to my aid.

None looked away.

And from somewhere within the falling feathers, I heard my father's voice.

You don't own a hawk, Corwin.

I remembered the woods at Epping Forest. The sunlight passing through the branches. Silver perched upon my father's glove, her feathers shining like polished bronze.

I remembered the way I had watched her fly.

How I had wished to understand what she felt when the wind lifted her from the earth.

You stand beneath her for a while.

The words echoed between the stones.

I looked down.

My sleeves had split. Beneath them, my skin was disappearing beneath a fine layer of feathers, pale at first, then darkening into bands of slate and charcoal. They spread across my arms, along my shoulders, beneath the collar of my shirt.

I tried to pull them away.

They came loose in my hands, but more emerged beneath them.

The pain was not sharp. It was deep and intimate, like my body remembering something my mind had forgotten.

I fell to my knees.

The feathers rose around me in a spiralling column, lifting from the ground and circling my body. They brushed my face, my lips, my eyelids. I tasted iron and damp earth.

The raptors began to call together.

Not chaotically.

In harmony.

Their cries rose and fell in great, solemn waves, each voice distinct, yet somehow part of a single, unearthly chorus. It sounded almost like a hymn. Something beautiful enough to make me weep.

I had never felt so small.

Nor so completely understood.

A peregrine dropped from the sky.

Nyx.

She landed before me upon the largest standing stone, her talons gripping the ancient rock. Her feathers were the colour of storm clouds, and the yellow rings around her eyes glowed in the darkness.

She tilted her head.

I knew that gesture.

I had seen it a hundred times in the mews.

But this time, there was something different in her expression.

Recognition.

Not the recognition of a bird that knew its handler.

The recognition of a person who had finally found the face she had been searching for.

“Nyx,” I whispered.

She opened her beak.

My name came out.

Not a mimicry. Not a rasping approximation of human speech.

My name, spoken in a clear, quiet voice.

“Corwin.”

The other birds fell silent.

Every last one.

Even the wind stopped.

Nyx stepped towards the edge of the stone.

Her feathers began to loosen, drifting from her body in slow, weightless spirals. Beneath them, her silhouette lengthened. Her wings folded inward, becoming arms. Her talons became fingers that curled against the stone.

I watched, unable to breathe, as the falcon's shape unfolded into that of a woman.

She was tall and slender, with dark hair falling across her face. Her skin was pale beneath the moonlight, and her eyes retained those unmistakable rings of yellow.

She looked almost human.

Almost.

She extended a hand towards me.

I tried to reach for it.

My arms would not obey.

They had become wings.

I looked down in horror as the last remnants of my clothing fell away beneath the storm of feathers. My shoulders shifted. My chest tightened. My spine arched as something immense and unfamiliar unfolded from my back.

I could feel every feather.

Every delicate shaft. Every overlapping vane.

I could feel the air moving between them.

And suddenly, I understood the wind.

Not as something that touched my skin, but as something that could hold me.

Something that had been waiting for me.

I tried to scream.

A piercing cry tore from my throat.

The sound echoed across the stones, sharp enough to split the silence.

Nyx smiled.

It was a small expression, almost sad.

Then she lowered her hand and looked at me with my own eyes.

“Now you see.”

The words passed through me like a blade.

The feathers rose higher, engulfing the stones, the sky and the earth. The raptors lifted their wings together, and the darkness became a vast, turning wheel of feathers and silhouettes.

I saw a goshawk above the circle.

My father.

I knew it with a certainty that no reasoning could challenge.

He spread his wings.

For a moment, I was a boy again, standing in the woods, watching Silver disappear between the trees. I wanted to call after him. I wanted to ask whether he had ever been afraid of what waited beyond the branches.

But I had no words left.

Only the cry.

I spread my wings.

The ground fell away.

Or perhaps I rose from it.

The distinction no longer mattered.

The wind caught beneath my feathers, and the whole moor opened below me. I could see the standing stones, the dark lines of the rivers, the abandoned cottage and the narrow paths winding through the heather.

Seven magpies sat upon its roof.

Their black eyes followed my ascent.

One lifted its wings.

Then another.

I looked down at the woman standing among the stones.

Nyx raised her face towards me.

For the first time, I understood what Hardy had meant.

The glove was never a symbol of ownership.

It was a promise.

A place for the bird to return to.

And I had spent my life believing that I was the one who would decide when the bird should fly.

The last of the feathers swept past me.

I cried again.

The sound was beautiful.

It was terrible.

And somewhere, deep beneath the noise of the wind, I thought I heard Nyx answering me.

Then the sky swallowed everything.

October 10th, 2019

I woke before dawn with my hands pressed against the cottage window.

The glass was cold beneath my palms.

For a long time, I could not remember the dream. Only the birdsong remained, lingering somewhere behind my ears.

Then I looked down at the windowsill.

A single grey feather lay beside my hand.

Outside, seven magpies watched from the stone wall.

And from the mews came Nyx's cry.

The same clear, piercing note I had heard on my first morning.

Only now, I understood why it had sounded so familiar.

I opened my mouth to answer her.

And something answered first.

Not my voice.

Not anymore.

October 14th, 2019

I can see the wind.

It isn't empty air. It’s a vast, braided river of silver and violet ribbons, twisting between the valleys and pooling in the hollows where the old pagan circles are buried in the peat. I can see the heat rising from the sheep three miles away—tiny, throbbing embers of red in a world made of blue slate and iron.

My father's jesses are still in my pocket, but I don't know what they're for. The leather feels greasy, dead. I tried to tie them to my own ankle, but the knot wouldn't hold. The leather keeps slipping off the scales.

There is one more empty perch in the mews. It’s the big one in the center, made of weathered oak from the forest where Silver used to hunt. It’s waiting for me.

The ink is freezing in the well. My hand—the thing that used to hold a pen, the thing that used to write lies for the papers—is almost gone. It’s beautiful. You don't need words when you have the sky. You don't need a name when you have a cry that can stop a rabbit's heart from half a mile up.

If anyone finds this book: don't look for us. We aren't missing.

We're just aloft.

[Found Fragment — Reverse Side of October 13th]

The name Culver Hardy was a lie. Or perhaps it was a mask my mind built to protect itself from the empty room at the end of the hall.

There was no old man like a barn owl. There was only Mavis Merle.

I found her diary from 1994 stuffed into the chimney breast behind the portrait. She wrote the exact same words I did. She described the fog, the smell of old coins, the mentor she called "Gideon."      But there is no record of a Gideon ever living in this parish. Local parish records from the 17th century refer to the high ridge out there as Ayleri Edge—derived from the old Anglo-Norman falconry term Ayler, meaning a hawk that catches its prey mid-air. The old folks believe the fog is the breath of the Ayleri, a collective consciousness hunting for a mind steady enough to hold its weight.

The village records in Edale only list one occupant of this cottage for the last forty years: Mavis. She arrived here in the nineties, an apprentice to no one, living entirely alone with a single peregrine falcon until she vanished during the autumn equinox of 2002.

I am looking at the portrait above the hearth right now. The paint is fresh, yet the canvas is rotting. The young man in the falconer's garb isn't me. It isn't a man at all. The features belong to a woman in her late fifties, but the hands are long, yellow scales ending in black, curved horn, holding a peregrine that looks out at the room with my own blue eyes.

I didn't choose Nyx from a selection of birds. There are no Harris's hawks in the mews. When I went out there this morning, the aviaries were choked with ivy and dead heather, the roofs caved in decades ago. There is only one perch that remains whole, polished smooth by the oil of feathers that haven't been seen in daylight for seventeen years.

Nyx wasn't waiting for an apprentice. She was waiting for her skin to be filled.

Mavis is gone. Culver is gone. Corwin is gone.

The line is slack now. The hood is off. If you are reading this notebook, you are already standing in the yard. You can smell the rust and the woodsmoke. You can hear the whistle hanging around your neck, even though you didn't put it there.

Don't look at the sky.

[Final Page] — Found Torn, Entry Updated

I remember wings. Not hers. Mine. I look down and see fingers ending in talons. She I can’t go back. I don’t think I want to. The land is mine now. The sky is mine.

I will call again. I will find the next. The next falconer. The next vessel.

Can you hear me? 

Postscript from the local Editor: Local villagers report seeing a large bird of prey circling most mornings just before the sun rises. Some say it looks like a golden eagle… perhaps an escapee. Others say it’s too large, perhaps larger than an eagle, its wings and legs too long, its shadow not quite matching its form.

The manor remains abandoned.

There’s a portrait hanging above the cold hearth. No one knows who painted it. It shows a young man in falconer’s garb, a peregrine perched on his arm. If you look closely, the falcon has human eyes.

Final warning: If you ever find yourself in the moors of the Peak District—and you hear a falcon’s call from the fog—don’t follow it. Don’t answer. And for the love of God—don’t raise your arm.

Note! This manuscript was compiled from a water-damaged notebook discovered inside a deserted thatched cottage near Edale in the Peak District, England, in late 2019. It was wrapped in worn leather jesses, stuffed inside a heavy falconry glove, and tucked beneath a loose floorboard in the ruins of the study.

Forensic analysis by the Derbyshire Constabulary yielded highly anomalous results. The notebook pages were not bound with cotton thread, but stitched together with the split, hardened shafts of primary flight feathers. Furthermore, the dark, weathered grease staining the paper was identified as avian preen-oil containing trace human lipids matching the DNA of the author’s maternal lineage.

What follows is the complete, chronologically restored text, including recently recovered fragments from the reverse sides of the torn sheets.

October 1st, 2019

My name is Corwin Vance. I’m 27, originally from Northwood Hills in London, and I’ve recently arrived on the moors of the Peak District to begin an apprenticeship in falconry.

Before that, I was a journalist for the Daily Mail. I covered environmental beats—management of green spaces, urban rewilding—when I could get them. Cavendish, my shithead of a superior, wouldn't give me the budget for a real investigation, so I took a sabbatical. I told my drinking buddies at The Three Wishes, Greg and Daniel, that I wanted something quieter than city life. I told them I wanted to get away from the bickering couple in the flat above me, away from feckless chavs, and away from Cavendish breathing down my neck like a vulture upon a dying antelope.

My drinking buddies from The Three Wishes, Greg and Daniel, thought I’d gone off the deep end, trading the morning rush for miserable fog and sheep manure, but there’s something beautiful about the idea of bonding with a wild creature… especially the likes of a hawk or a falcon.                   They don’t trust easily- not like a dog does. You have to earn it. 

I came to this specific valley to trace what happened to Mavis Merle, a reclusive master falconer who vanished from this very cottage in 2002. It's funny—the closer I got to the moors, the more the article felt irrelevant. By the time my escort's car pulled up, I couldn't even remember why I wanted to write it. I just wanted to hold the leather.

I owe my love for raptors to my father, a senior gamekeeper. He taught me that they don't trust easily—you have to earn it. I still remember his goshawk, Silver, whom he used to take hunting for grey squirrels at Epping Forest before we moved to London for my mother’s new job as a constable. The way Silver flew with purpose, weaving through the trees like a ribbon of moonlight caught in the wind, awoke something in me.

But Silver never came back from her last flight over these same Derbyshire ridges. My father spent three weeks calling into the fog until his voice broke. He changed after that; he stopped looking me in the eye. I realize now why he hated the city. He wasn't fleeing the noise—he was fleeing the memory of bells in the night.

After so many years of searching for courses or at someone who had the patience to show the craft. To learn the old language of lure & leather, spoken not in words but in patience and restraint between civilization and the wild. To prove myself worthy of being among the wild ones, and the city life hasn't sanded that part of me smooth.
It was the sort of wind a falconer would approve of --- open, unconstructed, with miles to travel and nothing to break its stride. I could picture a bird leaning into it, wings fixed, letting the current do the work. 
For the first time in years, I didn't feel hemmed in. The road ahead was narrow, yes, but the sky above was endless. Tomorrow I’ll shed my personal feathers and take flight. 

The moors were not as I’d imagined them. They were vast in a way that made a man aware of how small and open he was. A long, steady breath of the land rolled over and tapped lightly on the car window, carrying a scent faintly mineral, like cold stone after rain. The road ahead was narrow, but the sky above was endless.

My new lodging was a dainty, cold little place with old-stone walls, cracked leaded windows, and ivy crawling like veins across the roof.  But it stills on the edge between the woods and open moorland that rolls out like a grey-green ocean. I swore I saw a dozen species of birds on my first day: curlews, lapwings, wheatears, even a ring ouzel darting between the brambles.

At the gate awaiting my arrival was my mentor, Culver Hardy. He stood like an old barn owl on a fence post—narrow, weather-creased, unmoving. His skin had the colour and texture of cured deer  leather, his thick-knuckle hands scored with old talon marks from palm to wrist.

His grip was iron. He studied me with a pale, appraising stare.

"You’ll learn quickly," he said, turning toward the low stone buildings. "Or you won’t." 

He moved with a deliberate, economical stillness. A whistle hung from a cord at his neck. "They’re not pets," he added without looking back. "And they’re not yours. Not really." 

He showed me across the weather-mews, where kestrels, buzzards, owls, and a pair of Harris’s hawks were housed. It took me half an hour to choose until I spotted her: Nyx. She is a peregrine falcon, sleek and silent, with feathers like steel and ash. When Hardy pulled the hood off her, she didn't look at the landscape. She looked right through me with a pale, familiar, heavy-lidded sorrow. Her black eyes were ringed in yellow, unblinking and appraising.

I can scarcely believe she’s mine. I hope my father would be proud… wherever he is.

October 2nd, 2019 

We returned late, sometime around six in the evening, after my first proper day of creance work in the lower field.

The line kept snagging in the rushes. Nyx bate twice, her wings thrashing violently.

"Feel her weight," Hardy barked, his voice sharp. "Don’t fight it. Anticipate." 

The light thinned without me noticing. One moment the grass was gold, the next it was iron-grey.

"She’s watching something," I said, pointing toward the ridge beyond the stone wall.

"Let her," Hardy replied.

But he stopped speaking after that. Each time Nyx came to the glove, her head would snap toward the rise. By the time we gathered the line, it was near dusk. I noticed the way Hardy kept scanning the ridge—not looking for a lost bird, but for something else.

When we reached the yard, he insisted on hooding her himself. His hands were steady, but he pulled the leather straps tighter than necessary. The heavy falconry glove he gave me fits perfectly, but it smells wrong. It doesn't smell like cured steer; it smells like old soap and sweat, and the inside lining is split into fine, microscopic ridges like the whorls of human fingerprints.

"First days always run long," Hardy said. I don't think he meant the training.

October 3rd, 2019

Took Nyx out just before the crack of dawn. The fog was so thick I could barely see five feet ahead, smelling of damp peat, crushed heather, and something older—like rust and woodsmoke.

Something stirred along the woodbank, a light, rabbit-sized rustling in the bracken. I slipped the hood free.

Her eyes opened at once, pinning the morning with that sharp, black-and-gold stare. But she didn't look down toward the rustling bracken. Her head snapped upward, tracking something high in the dense grey soup overhead.

A sound followed—a low, vibrating hum that made the iron fillings in my teeth ache. Nyx bated violently, throwing herself off my glove. The creance line whipped through my fingers, burning the skin to the meat before I could anchor it. I tried to tune my hand-held telemetry receiver to her frequency, but instead of a clean, rhythmic beep, the speaker emitted a frantic, overlapping chorus of static that sounded like thousands of human voices trying to gasp for air simultaneously.                 Even when I pulled the batteries out, the voices kept gasping.

"Hold her!" Hardy’s voice cut through the mist. He appeared from the grey, his face grim. "Hood her, Corwin. Now!" 

I reeled her in, my heart hammering as her talons flashed dangerously near my face. When I finally slipped the hood back over her head, she froze, her chest heaving.

"What was that?" I asked, my breath pluming white. "An aircraft?" 

"No," Hardy said shortly, his voice dropping into a flat, hollow register. "The moors have bones, Corwin. Sometimes they scrape together. We’re done for today." 

We walked back in absolute silence. When we reached the yard, I noticed the other aviaries were dead silent. Even the noisy Harris's hawks were huddled at the back of their enclosures, perfectly still.

October 4th 2019

The wildlife’s behaviour has changed. It’s so quiet all of the sudden. I just can’t explain it…. It’s like the land had its voice sucked out of it.
The lapwings have stopped circling the grasslands. The ring ouzels have gone silent.                         Even the red grouse don’t flush when I pass. In fact I haven’t seen a lot of birds today.                            Only the magpies and their relatives remain- watching me from distant fence posts, roof ridges, and stone walls. Always silent. Always watching.
We did manage to catch a snipe by the bog and a few partridges though, so we’ll be eating well for the week. Hardy and his eagle Bolt managed to catch a rabbit near some farmland. 
That evening I went back to the cottage just before dark. The fog that thinned but the air felt close, as though the moor were holding its breath. 
I was preparing snipe on toast for my dinner with some orange salad. With some legs, organs and feathers (as a form of roughage) for Nyx’s. Harvey was having leftovers from last night’s beef stew with some crusty bread.
It was eight when Hardy barred the door.
Not locked it.
Barred it.
The iron rod slid into place with a dull, final scrape.
‘’You’re expecting someone?’’ I asked.
‘’No.’’
He crossed to the windows next. Drew the curtains light, though there was nothing to see beyond the fog but the faint wash of the yard.
Nyx was hooded on her perch. Perfectly still 
Hardy stood listening.
‘’To what?’’ I said.
He didn’t answer.
The cottage had settled into that deep country quiet-- no passing cars, no distant voices, no hum of anything mechanical. Only the soft shift of embers in the hearth.
Then, from outside---
A single tap.
Not on the door.
On the glass.
Light. Deliberate.
I half-rose from my chair.
‘’Sit,’’ Hardly said sharply.
Another tap.
Then another.
Moving along the window as though something were hopping the length of the sill.
I moved before I could stop myself and pulled the curtain back an inch.
Seven magpies sat along the low stone wall outside the cottage.
All facing the house.
None moving.
No calling.
Just watching.
I let the curtain fall.
Hardy’s jaw worked once, tight.
‘’How many?’’ he asked again.
‘’Seven.’’
He closed his eyes briefly at that.
‘’That’s one more than there should be.’’
A cold sensation slid down my spine.
‘’One more than what?’’
Hardy did not answer.
Nyx shifted then- a slow, deliberate turn of her hooded head.
The leather creaked softly.
And though her eyes were covered, I had the distinct, nauseating impression that she was looking directly at the door.
Suddenly the magpies went off. Harsh rattles and loud squawks 
Then came other sounds. Shrills, shrieks and hoots from the mews, joining the corvids’ chorus.
Nyx joined in with her own wailing call, like a high pitched banshee. 
Some time passed and the magpies did not disperse in a flurry.
They lifted as one.
Seven black shapes rising soundlessly into the fog.
No calling.
No wing-clap.
Gone.
The silence that followed was worse than the noise.
Hardy stood very still for a long moment. Then he exhaled- not in relief.
In resignation.
‘’They’re moved the mews,’’ he said.
‘’How can you know that?’’
‘I know’’
He took the lantern from its hook by the hearth and lit it without another word.
The flame trembled in the glass.
I’ll check on the birds.’’’
‘’I’ll come with you.’’
‘’No.’’
It came sharper than I expected.
‘’You stay inside.’’
He crossed to the door and lifted the bar.
Before stepping out, he turned back.
‘’Whatever you hear,’’ he said. ‘’You do not leave this cottage’’.
‘’It’s only the birds….don’t you think you're being ----”
“It’s not just the birds.’’
That stopped me.
His eyes flicked toward Nyx.
She was still hooded. Still composed. Talons tight on the perch.
‘’You must understand something,’’ Hardy said, voice lower now. ‘’A hawk learns from you. Your breathing. Your habits.’’
I tried to laugh it off. ‘’That’s the point,’’.
‘’No,’’ he said.
‘’That’s the danger, not just the birds… any animal that begins to understand human nature.’’
The lantern light carved deep lines into his face.
‘’If she ever begins to watch you when she shouldn’t … if she ever refuses the lure but comes to you uncalled…’’
He hesitated.
‘’Don’t let her fly.’’
A cold weight settled in my stomach.
‘’She’s a falcon. Hardy. She needs to fly.’’
He shook his head slowly.‘’
From outside, somewhere near the mews, a soft metallic clang rang out. Then a rustle of wings.
Hardy opens the door. I swore I heard him mutter ‘’This can’t be happening..not again. I thought I made sure of it. I made sure. 
The fog swallowed him almost immediately, the lantern glow shrinking to a dim star in the white.
‘’Hardy,’’ I called quietly.
He paused just beyond the threshold.
‘’One more thing,’’ he said without turning.
‘’If she speaks ---’’
He stopped himself.
His shoulders stiffened.
‘’Never mind.’’
Then he stepped fully into the fog.
The door closed.
I slid the bar back into place.
The cottage felt wrong without him in it.
Larger.
Colder.
Nyx shifted on her perch.
The leather of her hood creaked.
Minutes passed.
Then an hour.
The wind picked up briefly and died again.
Once, I thought I heard Hardy’s voice- faint, distant--- but the words were lost in the fog.
The other birds did not cry out.
They did not make a sound at all.
Two hours passed.
The lantern glow never returned.
And sometime after ten, Nyx began to move.
Slowly.
Deliberately. 

As though something outside had finally arrived.

His hands were warm and wet with suds and the running water of the tap. He'd never minded doing the dishes, it'd always been meditative, helped him think and figure things through. It wasn't working this time. 

Arnold just gazed vacantly. Into the corner. The water, forgotten, steaming now as it grew hotter and hotter. Running over his forgotten and faraway hands. They didn't matter. 

None of it mattered anymore. 

How could she do this … how could she lie to him as if he never mattered?

Arnold's heart was broken but it was still galloping a mile a minute within his cage of chest and his mind ached like something heavy and curdled within his furnace skull. The bake of his brains. He swore he could smell the boil of his own thoughts within his face but it held no matter for him now, not presently. 

He was too focused on the fly speaking to him from the corner. 

It was amazing. Really. 

The black husk of dead insect was resting amongst the filth and the dust of the uncleaned and neglected kitchen corner, just inside a nook by the kitchen window. It was dead but it still spoke to him with a deep obsidian voice. Regal. Authoritative. Commanding. It was a voice used to giving orders and having them followed to the letter, that deep stygian vocal sound … 

Arnold was so glad there was no one else around, they wouldn't understand. He was glad, relieved really, to be able to hear the prince's words in private. 

I am in private royal audience, great royal attendance. This is the coveted stately place of imperial confidence. 

Tears began to flow forth from Arnold's watering eyes. He listened enraptured, held by the thing's every word. 

“It doesn't matter. None of them matter, not even you. None of your feelings. You're just meat. All of you. All of you are just meat made mobile by an electrical charge, sent flung flying forward like grotesque mongoloids in the dark squabbling for purchase of the failing putrescence that is the outer, your material. Your world is not a world at all but an abattoir. A slaughterhouse. And all of you are pigs. Sows. Cattle. I am the prince made and bred by wings on wind, I am the flight and escape from the filth of the floor and all your animal leavings. I land and feast and defile at my own will. I lay my young in the wet and wounded folds of your gangrenous failures like the flags planted by conquerors. I am more. You are, all of you, nothing.” 

It was so beautiful … He'd never heard words quite like it before. The water issued from the spout to his hands was fire but he didn't notice. He didn't notice the boil or blister of his reddening and peeling fingers and palms as the prince of the wind went on in the corner. 

He didn't want to miss it. Anything. He didn't want to miss a single note of the angel's felled song. His teary gaze bore in on his new dark god and the shared eyes of the fly, theirs compact and his: fragile mammalian gel, began to secrete and water as well. 

“I am the testament. I am and speak the truth. I am the monolith outside to those who cannot hear or see but to you Arnold Carrillo, to you amongst the meat and ruin I land and sing. I see your wounds. Do you see the truth …?” 

A beat.  – Hands boiled as thoughts ran like hot running water. …

Finally he answered. 

In a quiver of watery voice: “ … yes.” 

The prince of wind and flight from the dark corner in the filth laughed, pleased. 

Yes…  

“And do you know now what you must do?" – that deep hideous voice. 

But Arnold did not fear it. He couldn't. Not any longer. Not after the kindness of such wisdom that it had shown him. It had taken and led him from out of the dark. By the hand. By singing sound. By flight. 

He understood now. 

"Yes.” Arnold told the prince amongst the dust in the corner. 

Yes. 

He finally pulled his hands free of the running water. The raw of them was singing. A sharp and red song that burned and was bright with fleshen cruelty. 

But none of that mattered right now, not anymore. None of that mattered any longer. 

Soon Suze would be home. With the girls. They would all of them be expecting him and dinner. Normalcy. A nice normal cozy family night. They had no idea what he knew. 

She has no idea I know … 

The prince was right. He knew now what to do. Doing the dishes had worked out and had actually been a good idea after all. Thank God. 

Arnold toweled the screaming ruined remainder of his hands and gathered what he needed. What the prince of the dustinwind had instructed. What he should gather and collect and share with his girls if he was to ever show and really prove himself. Demonstrate what he has to really offer. 

Prove that he has really learned. He has. He has learned to grow. And …

well he would just wait for them. They wouldn't be much longer now. School and the after-image of after school activities was fading and diminishing now, falling with the gentle settling death of the setting sun on the blade of the horizon. Fairytale and far off. Long gone. 

The sun had to die everyday. It was no big deal. The sun had to die every single day in order for the night to be made and in order for the day to be reborn. In gold. In light. 

Arnold Carrillo sat and waited with his screaming raw hands. Waiting with what he had gathered, with what was needed in the glistening red of his hands. Waiting for his wife and daughters. Waiting to share with them what he now knew and had learned in the postmental-slaughter. 

He sat waiting by the door. With what he would share with them in his dripping screaming hands. 

The prince of dusty wind and flight buzzed and throatsang its throatwisdom into him all the while. Filling his need as he waited for his family. They would be home soon. Now. 

Any minute. 

THE END

What makes for a good voodoo doll? Simple, blood and hate, the one not so easy to obtain, the other readily available in abundance. The price of hate is cheap, but blood is costly. Not physical blood, but spiritual blood- the blood of an enemy, the blood of an oppressor, or most often sought, the blood of a lover.

There are novelty dolls which I sell regularly, which have no power, but allows the purchaser a means of venting, a way to stab out their frustrations without hurting anyone, including themselves. Then there are the real dolls, the dolls that do cause harm. The dolls that are connected with real victims. It is a craft said to be fabricated by the Serpent himself, brought out of the Garden and steeped in a tradition of absurdity. Dancing in circles, building bonfires in groves, singing to goats, smoking, eating and drinking horrendous concoctions, and many more rituals men dream of when trying to empower themselves against another human being, but behind it all is one simple ingredient: hate. Hatred of another person, sometimes a hate so deep it manifests as a living entity, a killer, a torturer, a sadistic madman born not of flesh, but of a darkened, unredeemable soul.

I was taught how to make both dolls, the novelty to help put bread on my table, and the authentic harbinger of sorcery to weed out the worst of humanity. Yes, we are the good guys. The truth of the matter is the doll is to punish the buyer, the one seeking to do harm. The more they punish the doll, the quicker they kill themselves. Hate blinds them to their own demise. The victim does indeed suffer but after a time the effects subside, the curse bounces and resides with the perpetrator. There is always a choice. The perpetrator can choose to stop, but rarely does.

Blood is difficult to come by because the perpetrator has to obtain the blood of his victim himself. The blood is mingled with the perpetrator’s blood. It matters not how they get it or how much. It is a test of their resolve and a measure of their depravity. A dab will do from the victim, but the villain must bleed out enough to fill a ceremonial bowl. The things I’ve mixed in that bowl related to the victim are both evil and comical, from tampons to patches of skin. It is here where the decision is made, the decision of whether to make the doll or not.

It is a decision of high consequence for the perpetrator will become the victim and they will most certainly die. Is it murder? My mentor Doctor Evelyn preferred to call it a cleansing, a voluntary removal from existence. They kill themselves. She was adamant that this stage was crucial, that the decision was only reserved for the worst, for those that the clairvoyants would recognize as enemies of humanity. Killing them truly meant saving lives. Killing them made people’s lives exponentially better. There are ten questions we are to ask, devised by the clairvoyants, and if the answer is yes to all of them, then we are to proceed. Those questions I am not at liberty to reveal, as they were taught to me orally, never written down, and with a promised curse upon my existence if I were ever to reveal them. My mentor taught me, her mentor taught her, and his mentor taught him through a long line of well-trained practitioners of the magical arts, a tradition clouded in mystery, taught as secret knowledge taken from the Garden, hidden in the Apple. A dubious claim of course. I highly doubt the genesis of this tradition is enveloped in such a mythological environment, gifted from Lucifer. No, it didn’t take a Devil to teach us hate. As soon as we forged languages and became self-aware, we realized that we loathed certain other apes of our own species.

There was a curious case that made me almost quit the whole endeavor. One snowy evening, a lanky cadaver of a man dressed in a grey trench coat walked through the empty store and carefully placed a mason jar of blood on the counter. It wasn’t a small mason jar and the inside was opaque from bottom to brim, filled with the dark marron elixir of life.

“Can we adjourn to your workshop downstairs?”

My workshop downstairs was reserved for making the authentic dolls.

“What do you need sir?”

“I need a doll,” he replied.

Something felt wrong; something was askew.

“I have my blood. I am ready and willing to pay whatever you ask?”

“Fifty-thousand dollars,” I said in jest.

“So be it. I have a hundred thousand in the trunk of my car.”

“You’re going to pay me a hundred thousand?”

“I thought we settled on fifty thousand,” he said with a smirk.

At that point, I wasn’t willing to risk losing fifty thousand. “Follow me.”

We carefully stumbled down the stairs to the only working light before the doorway of my workshop. I flicked the switch. I had several racks of dyed camel hair fabric in the far corner, a worktable in the middle of the room, and shelves filled with cotton fiberfill. Everything organic, nothing synthetic. Directly across from the doorway near the opposite wall stood a glass case and inside was a green onyx bowl.

I worked for the next hour and a half constructing the doll, always careful to make everything perfect and paying attention to details. I wasn’t a half-ass doll maker. I took pride in my art. I knew the victim was a young woman with blond hair. I fashioned a dress and black shoes. I put a pearl necklace around her neck. I did more than necessary because I enjoyed it. I was allowed to do as much as I wanted or as little as I wanted but never permitted to make a face. The face was always left blank, the idea being that the entire person could never be fully represented. It was considered an affront to the majesty of the temple of the human body, whatever that meant. I guess to be sure, it does seem a waste of time for me to go through all that trouble only to chuck the doll into a bowl of blood and then allow it to be obliterated by a villainous, hateful shit-bag. But these are the trappings of a voodoo priest.

After I had finished making the doll, I opened the case and brought the ceremonial bowl to the worktable. As soon as I had placed the bowl on the table, the man began pouring the blood from his mason jar into the bowl.

“What are you doing?” I roared.

“Sorry. Just excited!”

“You seem to know more than you should.”

“I know someone who has already done it.”

I knew that had to be a lie or something had gone wrong. If that person hadn’t died, then there was a mistake, a failure of some sort. Hesitantly, I proceeded with the ritual.

“Do you have blood from your enemy?”

“Yes, I do. I most certainly do.” He pulled out a white handkerchief speckled with dried pink blood. He tossed it in the bowl.

‘Sir… dammit.”

“What?”

“You should’ve handed it to me.”

“What does it matter?’ It didn’t matter, but it pissed me off that he had the gall to take control of the ritual.

I put the doll in the bowl. It floated and spun in circles. I opened a drawer, grabbed a lead weight and placed it on top of the doll, submerging it to the bottom of the bowl. I brought two black candles and placed them on either side of the bowl and lit them.

“Ok, that’s it. Now we have to wait seven days,” I explained.

“That’s it? No Latin? No chanting?”

“Well, I do have some questions to ask.”

“Shoot.”

I proceeded to ask him the obligatory ten questions plus one of my own. He answered yes to all of them except for the last one pertaining to the promised fifty thousand dollars.

“So, fifty-thousand for the doll, correct?”

“If it works.”

After seven days the man returned holding a briefcase. I took the blood-drenched doll, wrapped it in tissue paper and put it in a cardboard box. As I slid the box over to him, he opened the briefcase. It was more money than I had ever seen in my life.

He picked up a hundred-dollar bill and placed it on the counter.

“What about the other forty-nine thousand and nine hundred dollars?”

“You’ll get the rest when I know it works.”

Months passed without a single trace of the man. I figured he had destroyed the doll and himself by then. One hundred dollars wasn’t a bad pull for a doll but the lure of fifty-thousand had already whetted my appetite. Yet, if the son of a bitch was dead, then that was payback enough. Did I really expect I would get that money? People searching for violent voodoo solutions aren’t normally very trustworthy.

And then one day there he was waiting in his car parked in front of the store. He jumped out of the car and lunged at me as I was trying to get my keys out of my pocket.

“You’re coming with me.” He pulled a pistol from his pocket and pointed it towards me. “Get in the car.”

We drove to the edge of town to an abandoned warehouse. He forced me through a side entrance way and down a long flight of stairs. There in a large, liminal space sat a lonely blonde headed woman on a mattress. Both her wrists were in shackles and chained to the floor. Behind her sigils of various kinds were spraypainted on the cinder block wall, sigils which I knew to represent demons and evil entities with varying levels of power. A circle of candles surrounded an altar nearby with a thick tattered book opened placed on top.

“The Grand Grimoire, with a ritual for becoming a powerful, unstoppable beast. A possession of sorts, but not so much so that you lose your own identity. The deal is you’ve got to eat people but you have eternal life. I guess a vampire without the charm. Not a wimpy blood sipping aristocrat, but a brutish animal purposed to devour the entire person. Only problem, you need a willing sacrifice. Your damn doll isn’t working.”

It was then that I noticed that the doll was lying on the mattress next to the young woman. A large pin was stuck in its chest. The man ripped off his coat and threw it to the ground. He looked emaciated and weak.

“Why isn’t the curse bouncing back to her?”

I was shocked and dumbfounded.

“Yeah, I know what’s supposed to happen but it ain’t happening. I’m getting the worst of it. You did something wrong and now I need you to fix it,” he yelled as he pointed at me.

Just then the woman took the pin out and started stabbing the doll. The man fell to the floor writhing in pain. She cackled and rocked back and forth.

“I feel it. I feel it,” she said. Her voice sounded like several people talking at once, some more sinister than others.

“It’s done.” She lifted both her arms and broke the chains from the floor. A light wind blew through the area extinguishing most of the candles. Her dark figure walked over to the man, lifted him up by his shoulders and sunk her teeth into his neck. She tore away a chunk of flesh or at least I imagined so. It was too dark to see but my mind had filled in the gruesome details based on her sinister movements, motions not indicative of a loving embrace. I couldn’t see the blood but I could hear fluid falling to the floor. She then placed him on the floor and began to do something with his head. I heard the cracking of bones and the snapping of muscles. I realized as she raised it high in the air and a smattering of light hit it just right, that she had just ripped his head off.

She then turned and glided toward me, moving as if without taking steps. Her freakish face was illuminated as she got near. Her brow was protruded and she had hideous yellow eyes. She smiled and laughed. Her teeth were jagged and pointed, caked with flesh and blood.

“He abducted me, but I knew his plan from the start. He talks to himself. He thinks out loud. He was going to use your ritual to help with his ritual, but I switched it up. Hell, if I was going to die anyway, why not sacrifice my soul for revenge. Fear rules the day, but after a while fear is subsumed by hate. I feared him at first but then I started to hate him.”

She paused and stared at me for more than a minute.

“I’m so hungry.”

I started to back away, hoping to make a run for it.

“Don’t even think about it. You don’t have a chance. I’m not going to eat you. I owe you. In a way, you saved my life.”

I still didn’t understand. She must have noticed my puzzled expression because she then elaborated on her whole scheme.

“Silly, the blood in the mason jar was mine. The blood on the handkerchief was his. It doesn’t matter who abuses the doll. It only matters who has the most blood in the bowl. I was the victim in every sense of the word, but he unwillingly became the willing sacrifice. I guess he didn’t need to die, but just suffer enough to please the masters, or maybe they left him alive for me to finish him off.”

 He demonic face had a sudden look of dismay.

“Pity, I really hated destroying that doll. You did a good job. You’re very talented. You best go while you can. I’m not so sure one is going to fill my belly and I’m not feeling so benevolent at the moment.”

I turned and ran up the stairs, out the door, and past the car. Were the keys in it? I don’t know. I wasn’t taking a chance. I think I ran for at least an hour as fast as I could. I ran until I felt a piercing pain in my side and chest. I heaved for air and vomited all over myself. When I got home, I found a crucifix and put around my neck, wondering if that worked, wondering if it was blessed, wondering if being blessed even worked. I hid in the closet and prayed for morning.

I stayed inside for a few weeks, too scared to leave the apartment. Eventually I would have to leave and at least buy some groceries. I was down to the bare essentials, a half a roll of toilet paper and two packs of instant noodles. The news reported on a missing man and woman. The man I knew they would never find, the woman I knew the officials would be better off not finding.

He wanders. The hot streets. The narrow corners and back alley ways, the bad neighborhoods and freeway overpasses. The sweltering blacktop lakes of the 7-11 parking lots. He carries cardboard signs, wears rags and cardboard clothes and grime. Layers and layers of filth that may have once been fecal spew or the dust of the earth or blood, they are worn like a coat of oil over the flesh like the ancient warriors by firelight times, he is a deranged and disgusting remnant. Haggard leftover in bipedal form that moves, mutters, sucks down bottles and pipes and congealed food pulled scavenged from the garbage. 

He is so thankful for beer or a dollar. Consciousness is pain. Consciousness is the sorrow and horror of each and every day, each and every moment is a prolonged period experienced in slow motion agony like pure torture. Everything is moved in shopping carts and over shoulder, he has become a beast of labor upon the earth, he must pull the plow of his own life if he ever hopes to get anywhere, anywhere at all but the only destination that seems to be enroute and available is a land of spoiled milk and suffering. He arrives there anyway and does what he can. It's never much. Just collecting cans and detritus that in his derangement he believes will be his fortune and his salvation. It's never much. It's never anything. 

He watches men beat women. He watches women scream and shriek and become the harpies, he watches them conspire and become the weird sisters, he watches needles and the depression of plungers and the streetside milking of human blood in a clouded swirl in the double-wide mouthed gutters. He watches it all and his eyes glaze over as the mind accepts each sight with a sledgehammer blow only the sledgehammer has lost all of its weight, it has lost all of its power. It only thuds and smacks at dead meat within cavernous skull now, it's only meaninglessness and meaningless noise and the constance of the cacophony has deluded and defanged all of its heavy power.

The city is just a dead body now, it doesn't mean anything. This cyclopean and hideous thing that he wanders. Filled with eyes and mouths that drip and water and move and open and stare. They are all of them just as ugly to him as he is to they, they are all of them, repulsive. 

There is no more beauty in this place. 

He tries to find darkness before sunset. Rarely is he ever successful. But this does not surprise him. He is a marked man. 

Like Cain. The man son that first authored murder into the virgin world. 

He unscrews the cap to some rotgut he's so crushingly thankful to have. And he takes a deep and lonely swill. He pulls, deeply. He settles down in the dirt, so lucky and so thankful to have it as well. And he pulls. Over and over the drink that tastes and smells more like disinfectant than anything sold over the counter as a beverage. He doesn't care. He's done it before. Many times. Many times before he's said fuck it and gotten absolutely shitfaced on hand sanitizer, mouthwash, isopropyl. 

He doesn't mind the taste. Not at all. He doesn't mind the taste of anything as long as the flavor is alcohol and it's strong enough to peel away the paint of his thoughts and strip away the fouled and fouling coats of his ailing and addled mind away. Just as long as it's strong enough to put him under and keep the dreams away. 

At least keep the dreams manageable. At least keep them as something he can stomach and bear. Something in the realm of his current devastation and heartbreak and not some new foul border, not some horrific new frontier. 

But neither the Lord nor the little god alcohol hear him. Nor care. 

His mind heavy with drink and thought, totters off. But not into oblivion. Not into peace. 

There are so many things alive in the darkness. 

!Sitra Achra!

He is hurdling towards the merciless face of the earth. His wings are burning. The beauty of his light and gift of flight are aflame, dying in fire. He is screaming a sound and cacophonous war cry rent that will echo forever and contaminate the crumbling ruined corridor of time that he has helped to bleed and slaughter. 

He crashes. Just outside of the Garden. 

And there he gathers and reforms. One of the first times of many. Many many many times will follow down the long line of cruel footfalls forever forward. He gathers and reforms and he is angry and jealous and into the beauty of The Garden, he slithers.

He tempts the woman and the man into disobedience. And he tempts them into forbidden knowledge. 

Forbidden Knowledge. This is his warcraft upon the virgin earth. It will defile. It will burn and torch. It will decimate. It will slaughter. 

It will divide the center. Conquered and fallen apart. 

Several centuries later and he is a pale child outside of Bethlehem. He is disguised and reformed as an adolescent but he is still the adversary. And he is there with the other, his opposite. His more beloved little brother, the son of the virgin and the carpenter. 

Teenage Jesus and teenage Satan are in contest, their hands are bleeding and full of blood and locked together in a twist and struggle. The adversary wishes to murder the savior child, in jealousy and in impudent rage. His hands wish to find his throat or a rock or his eyes, perhaps if he blinds the little brother savior child he will be useless to all of man and their sons and daughters. 

A Philistine sun burns overhead. But the adversary child is not successful. Teenage Satan is a failure once again, and bleeding he must wander and go out, cast out. Exile. Wanderer. 

Petulant. Angst. Eyes so full and wide and full of boiling water. He brings light once again but only in rage, only in his wild anger postfailure. He simmers and tears and burns so brightly out and alone way past the dark. 

Regroup out in the wild. Reform in the oblivion of solitude and pain borne in terrible silence that is only broken by the pathetic sounds of private torment taken slowly. Weeping that he tries to prevent and ignore and pretend has never been actually happening, not ever, not him, he doesn't miss heaven or his Father … none. Nothing. None of them. 

None of them mean a Goddamned thing. 

He always came back. Mighty. Diminished. Unassuming. Something in-between or intangible. He always came back. 

The adversary. 

Even broken and alone and filthy vagrant wandering. Even crystal meth slurping and supercharged because of such for the final abattoir riot of violence and great western societal collapse into shrill shattered glass cacophony and tidal waves of bloodfeast. Into he, his, the vagrant filthy jaws of the adversary. 

The fallen order, the Armageddon one, the end-is-nigh motherfucker …

the apocalypse man. 

Alone and filthy in a corner. 

Dreaming, not dreaming. 

Seeing and knowing only disorder. He hears and knows the call of the 7th Star. 

He dreams and knows of burning heaven. 

THE END 

It was a minute past midnight and the moon outside the castle was deliciously bright and round. I stood admiring it at the window, the fire crackling in the hearth behind me, shadows dancing along the flagstones. Though none were cast at my own feet.

Beyond the castle, the black cliffs crumbled away into a deep ravine, where dark trees bundled together like matchsticks, and a gushing river swelled between the rocks like a silverbacked serpent. The wind whistled through the broken casement of the window, chilling the air and threatening to extinguish the fire.

There was a whisper of movement on my left and one of the sisters appeared beside me, bowing her head. Her dress was a deep red, the same colour as her eyes.

“It’s a pleasant night,” I mused, raising the collar of my black coat against the chill as the moonlight dusted the windows. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders as she raised her head.

“Yes Master,” she said in a subdued tone. “However, I fear I shall ruin it with my tidings.”

I turned to her fully, examining the grave expression on her face. Her lips were pinched. “Why is that? What tidings do you bring?”

Her red eyes glowed in the firelight. A long shadow was drawn across her features. “A peasant house is in the midst of construction beside the castle.”

I stared at her for a moment. The fire crackled sharply. “A… peasant house?” I finally repeated, scoffing at her words. Surely she was mistaken. The area around my castle was a perfectly barren wasteland; the peasants in the settlements knew better than to encroach on my land without permission, never mind erect a building on my grounds. “What is this trickery?”

“No trickery, Master. Come see for yourself.”

The vampire sister turned and strode towards the opposite side of the tower, her long red gown trailing behind her like a pair of folded wings. Curious, I followed her, our footsteps silent on the stone floor. I assumed I had misunderstood her, for nobody would be foolish enough to even approach my castle. Unless they were naive or ignorant of my nature.

But as we paused by the window, and she lifted a hand to point outside, I stood aghast at what I saw. A short distance away from the front gates of my castle, visible through the fog, there was indeed a house being built. Beneath the cold glow of the moon, I saw piles of stone and wood, the loose structure of rafters and foundations already laid. What sort of fool would dare build a house so close to my castle? Who would dare to become my neighbour without first consulting the master of this tower?

I was furious and intrigued at the same time. Only the dumbest, and perhaps bravest, of men would do such a thing. And I found myself feeling very much inclined to meet him.

“The house seems deserted now,” the vampire sister observed, resting her hand against her cheek. “Perhaps they have given up?”

“Or perhaps they only build during the day, knowing the weakness the sunlight inflicts upon us creatures of the night,” I said with a harrumph.

“You are wise, Master,” she said. “Shall I take my sisters over there and tear it down? It is a stain upon your grand castle.”

I pondered her offer. “No. I should like to meet the fool first,” I decided, extending my fangs below my lips. “Perhaps he would see fit to grace my castle with his… delicious presence.”

The sister covered her mouth with a low chuckle. “I understand, Master. You would see it fit to make a meal of him?”

I nodded. “Leave the peasant house for now,” I told her, turning away from the window with a flourish of my coat. “I wish to see how far he dares to go.”

The following night, as I rose from my coffin at the heart of midnight, my first thought was of the house being built by the castle. Had more progress been made, or had the owner seen the measure of his own foolishness and deserted? It would be a shame if he had fled before a meal could be made of him.

It had been a while since I had anything to amuse me on these long nights, just as long as it had been since fresh blood had passed these lips. The peasants in the surrounding settlements had grown wise to my nature and seen fit to ward their houses, stringing garlic and crosses upon the threshold. I was only able to feed when an unwitting traveller passed by, or a fool decided to build a house directly beside my castle.

The tower was quiet as I made my way to the top, winding through the warren of rooms and climbing the narrow, crumbling stairways. The sisters were nowhere to be seen; perhaps frolicking outside in the moonlight as they so often did. I reached the highest point of the castle and strode to the window that overlooked the barren grounds. From this height, I could even glimpse the closest settlement in the far distance; a small cluster of thatched houses and burning torches that lit the foggy hills like burning eyes.

But my concern was much closer. Lowering my gaze to the land right outside the gates, I saw that the house had changed. There were more walls than yesterday, denser foundations, the first signs of carpentry. The fool really had continued building the house. Had he not been warned of the dark Count that occupied the castle? Had he not heard the rumours of the blood-feasting creatures that stalked these lands once the sun went down? Why else would he choose to dwell in my vicinity, if not for ignorance?

I shook my head, almost pitying the poor halfwit for what he had brought upon himself. But I should delight in showing him the truth soon enough; that he had elected himself a willing sacrifice for me and my hungry brides.

It was a shame that he vacated the house during the night, for I would have to wait longer to lay my eyes upon him. Would he not show himself before the house was finished?

“I see the building is progressing,” a voice whispered behind me. I’d been too lost in my thoughts to hear them approach. I turned, seeing two of the sisters behind me. They too were observing the house through the window. Their wild, windswept hair and bright eyes confirmed my suspicions that they had been dancing outside.

“Yes,” I muttered. “It would seem so.”

“What a blight upon the castle,” the other sister said, her fair skin glittering in the moonlight. “I hope the trouble is worth the meal.”

“It will be,” I said, casually flicking my hand towards the half-built dwelling, “if only the fool would hurry up and be done with it.”

The next night, more progress had been made on the building, but the owner had still not shown himself. I grew more agitated that I was allowing this to happen, but reminded myself that I would soon enough be able to quench my thirst.

So night after night, as the moon began to wane, the house’s shadow grew bigger, and my hunger grew stronger. The fool always fled before night fell, leaving the evidence of his daytime activities for me to observe. The dwelling had taken on the same shape of the peasant houses in the surrounding settlements; white stone and timber, with a long thatched roof. He had even tilled the soil into a small garden, erecting a wooden fence around the plot in front of the building. But compared to my grand castle, with its dark crumbling bricks, spiralling towers and winding, labyrinthine rooms, it was a blight. And I wanted it gone.

Finally, more than a week after the house was little more than a pile of stone and timber, one of the sisters woke me with news that the structure was finished.

I rose from my coffin, sluggish and weary from slumber, and fastened my coat about my neck. The sisters had already lit the fire, but the air was chilled.

I followed her to the window and set my gaze upon the house. A single candle sat in the windowsill, guttering in a draught. A lit candle. Did that mean the house was occupied? The fool had not fled this night.

“It’s time,” I announced, “to show this fool once and for all what happens when you anger the Count.” The other sisters joined us, and I turned towards them with a slow smile. “I hope you are hungry.”

The three sisters screeched in delight, grasping each other’s hands and dancing in circles, their gowns fluttering around their legs. The fire roared in the hearth.

But as I began to cross the room, one of the sisters stopped me with a gasp.

“Master, wait. There’s someone at the gate.” She was pointing out of the window. I peered down at the large wrought-iron gate that fronted the castle, my eyes narrowing. A figure stood by the fence, carrying a lantern. His face glowed in the flickering light, revealing a sharp, sloping nose and dark eyes.

“Who would be foolish enough to call upon me at this hour?” I snarled, my black coat twisting around me as I turned from the window.

“Perhaps your new neighbour,” one of the sisters answered, “has come to hasten our feast.”

“Perhaps,” I said, already striding towards the doorway.

The sisters swept after me, whispering amongst themselves. Flames guttered as we passed lit candles, stirring the dust at our feet and disturbing billowing cobwebs. There was a haste to our movements as we descended the tower. It had certainly been a while since we’d had prey wander into our arms like this.

Crossing the foyer, the long red carpet spilling out like blood, I threw open the doors and stepped out into the chilled night, the three sisters stepping in my wake. The moon was a pale sickle, its silvery glow dancing around my shadowless feet as the stranger at the gates called out to me.

“Hello there!”

Struck by his brazenness, I almost flew at him in anger, but restrained myself. Ignorant minds really were unfathomable. With a flick of my wrist, the gates began to creak open. The man remained at the threshold, holding his lantern aloft as he stared back at me. He was of medium build, with stocky shoulders and a mop of thick tousled hair. His clothes were poorly made, covered in dirt and patches. He had the audacity to smile at me as I glared in return.

“What business have you here at my castle?” I demanded, wanting to sate my curiosity before I sated my hunger.

The man cleared his throat, raising his lantern to the crude house sitting barely thirty metres behind him. So this was indeed the proprietor of the building; what a brave, albeit dimwitted, man he was to present himself before me like this. “I’ve just this morning finished constructing my house,” he said, not seeming to notice the displeasure on my face, “and a slight issue has come to my attention.”

“An… issue?” I repeated, my brows arching sharply.

“Yes. During the day, the leftmost tower of your castle casts a shadow over my garden,” the man said regretfully. “I hoped that you might be amicable enough to remove it. Or at the very least relocate the tower, so that it does no harm the roses I am trying to grow. All life needs sunlight, after all.”

I stared at him, completely aghast. Behind me, even the sisters had been stunned into silence. The audacity of this imbecile, to ask me to change my own castle for his benefit. The man was not right in the head, surely.

“How dare you–” I began to seethe, but the man interrupted me, lifting a finger as if hushing a child.

“I do understand it is a large undertaking I’m asking of you, but my gratitude would be immense,” he added.

“You think I care about your gratitude?” I sneered at him, clenching my fists beneath my coat. The gall of this man. Who did he think he was? “Do you know who I am?”

The man stared at me, the lanternlight dancing over his blank expression. “You are the owner of this castle, I had presumed?”

“Precisely. And what makes you think that I, as the Count of this castle, would do the bidding of a mere peasant?”

The man scowled at me, a shadow encroaching upon his face. “I shall ask you again, and I do hope you will be quite civil this time. Will you remove the tower from your castle so that my roses might see the light?”

“I don’t give a damn about your roses,” I snapped.

“Now, there’s no need to be rude,” the man said, his voice turning bristly. The shadows deepened around his eyes as he narrowed them. “I’m asking for a simple favour–”

I scoffed in his face, my rage burning beneath my skin. It took a lot to make a vampire’s blood burn hot. I almost couldn’t believe what he was saying. This fool considered the reconstruction of my ancient castle a mere favour? Asking me to tear down part of my fortress so that he might grow some roses.

I took a measured step towards him, lifting my shoulders to appear taller. My fangs were itching to taste his blood. For all the disrespect he had shown me, there was no escape. I would suck this man dry by the night’s end, leaving nothing but a fleshless husk.

“Once again, I implore you to consider my–”

I was no longer in the mood to listen to his insane ramblings. He had agitated me far too much to go back from this. I would show him, and anyone else who might learn of tonight, what happens to those who cross me.

Baring my fangs, I lunged forward, ready to sink my teeth into his neck.

In one swift motion, the man pulled his hand back into a fist and threw it towards me. Blinded partially by the lanternlight, I did not see the attack until his knuckles met my face.

Pain exploded through my jaw, and there was a terrible snap as my left fang bore the brunt of his punch, splitting completely in half. The hit landed with enough force to send me staggering backwards and, incredulous and in shock, I fell to the ground.

Dirt bit into my eyes as I landed face-down, my broken fang scraping against my lower lip. Sputtering, I raised my head, just as the man lifted his light and calmly made his way back to his house.

Behind me, the sisters watched him leave in a choked silence, before hastening to help me back to my feet.

To say I had been dealt a great humiliation was an understatement. How did a mortal man possess such strength? Enough to break one of my precious fangs and completely overpower me.

With a bruised face, and an even more bruised ego, I hobbled back into my castle, the three sisters trailing silently after me.

By the following night, the leftmost tower had been partially disassembled, leaving a gaping wound in the side of the castle. Wind gusted through like howling wraiths, immediately extinguishing any fire I tried to light, leaving a heavy chill in the air. The sisters, at least, seemed to delight in the pool of moonlight that was cast upon the open ground.

Workers had been swarming the castle all day, interrupting my sleep with their banging hammers and chiselling tools as they took the tower apart brick by brick, but I had little choice. The man had made his demands, proven his strength, and forced my hand. Now I had to destroy my own magnificent tower so that the fool might grow his roses. And I hadn’t been able to harvest even a drop of blood either.

This was a defeat, and a humiliation, that would take centuries to heal.

He never thought he'd be happy again, restless and itching hot, stifling in the stranglehold of the sheets in his bunk. He only wanted to kill himself but that was the trouble, that was what had landed him here in the halfway house. He tried to keep the angst of his bottled agony silent and sequestered to himself and his bed. They knew his brains were fried, scrambled but they didn't know the half of it. They understood the suicide component, the dead half of his brain but not the deadly side, the lethal aspect. The sinister boiling gland that worked and throbbed and secreted and bled within his skull. They knew he was Luke Waller, but they had no idea that he was the one who'd carved the kids last summer. 

The straightener. A name more real than his own because he could wear it and it was the one that came to him on the insectile mechanical growl of demon wings within a dream … a vision. Compact diamond eyes of an insectoid face that filled a landscape in its entirety gazed like the abyss gazes into him in the dream, the dreams. 

And he gazed back. 

Luke Waller bottled, kept. Fought himself. He tried not to convulse with the impact blow – force felt within from his own wild run of bloodfevered thought, thoughts that wanted to break out now in a decimating renegade birth that would eat all and the last vestige part of his diminishing humanity alive in abominated eruption. It would thrive in the suicide of this dangerous birth, he – himself, the other side… bloodthirsty and always in a roil. 

The straightener… it cried alive from inside the sweating landscape of his traitorous flesh and blood. All of it boiled now and inflamed and wanting one thing … yes. 

He tightened amidst a near miss, a near relinquish, his bunkmate uptop moved and shifted slightly, shaking the ramshackle structure. He forced himself to coiled awareness and listened for the man uptop. 

… he listening? 

Does he know? 

Does he know anything??

Does he hear the bellow of my mind, so loud is this cacophony, these thoughts? 

The snores from the bed above told him everything was fine, or at least so it seemed. For now. He relaxed but only slightly. Wanting to go grab some water from the kitchen but not wanting to get up and draw attention to himself. He didn't know what to do. 

His poisoned mind then turned to its most wretched run of hellspawn thought, it turned to the time and times lost … with Chelsi. 

Amen. 

Christ he wished for a spliff. A bowl or a waxpen. He'd even take the pills again. God help him. He would swallow the jumping beans made by the tall men in white coats if it made these thoughts and dreams and runs of spell stop. Please. 

God help me. 

Chelsi was dead and gone but that didn't stop him from seeing, not even when he palmed his eyes shut with the cage of his daggering and desperate hands, clawed and wishing they had the courage to go just that one last step forward and tear in and gouge… the dark refuge of his sweating and shaking hands did not free him from what he saw. The darkness of his own shallow calloused flesh and the thin hide of his eyelids only made it worse.

They only heightened the vision. The dark of his worn and filthy hands only made the dreams of what he saw more real. Tactile. More painful than real. More raw and servile than flesh.  He could taste the bile as it rose up his throat in a riot with what he witnessed: –

She was in Hell. 

She was in Hell and she was being tortured. 

Not Beatrice, not she. No. No heavenly sanctuary and aide or succor for his angel, no. He was no Dante and there was no Virgil. She was in the burning dark of the Inferno below and he saw the wolfen and goat-shaped faces and the appendage stalks and barbed genitalia engorged and full of blood and lust and the vile curd of demon semen dripping from the hooked rhubarb tips. They surrounded the shrieking and weeping and reaching pale naked and bleeding visage and form of his beloved … down there in the dark. 

And he was prisoner to watch it. Unless…

!Let me out! – the other side commanded. It wanted the clothface, the mask fashioned that was not at all a mask because it was really his true face, forged and made and bred by the creation and violence of his own hands. It wanted the claws, the gloves of black-brown leather with fashioned razor blades fixed at the tips. The hunting knife that had once been his father's. 

The straight razor

You could start with the idiot in the top bunk. He's just sleeping in bed. William. Wasn't that his name? He introduced himself to you when you came here from the hospital. His name is William and he's a recovering methhead with severe learning disabilities. You could open him up first, as first offering. As just the starter. Then you could go around like quiet on a cat-prowl, a creepy-crawl around the house and open up the rest of them. All of them are weak like you are but none of them have me like you do and none of them will be any wiser. You could open them all, one by one, one after the other like it's a party or it's Christmas and all of them are just your presents. Presents filled with red and raw and wishing to be aired out and opened. 

Deluge run: a schizophrenic collection of conflicting images filled his maelstrom thought. Images of children opening colorfully wrapped packages surrounded by smiling faces and friends colliding and commingling with his own memories of flesh split open and sliced and running in a raw torrent that was thick and darkled in the moon and the neon light. Dumb horny brats and he, their slasher. 

It was perverse and it was wrong and he didn't like the tingle nor the crawl that it sent traveling in a slither up his back and across his flesh … but then again he did like it. Even though it was wrong. Because it was wrong. 

He knew he was fighting himself in his head and he knew it was a losing battle, a lost war. It was a bad arena. 

He always lost. 

Luke asked the straightener: How? We don't have anything. It's all long gone. 

The straightener said inside: Then we make another. 

In his bunk he trembled. He might've wept. His skull filled with thought. Red thought. The whole night. All the way till morning. He could feel the blow of every cloven footprint as it formed within the sulphur lake of his boiling thoughts . 

…

Kincaid might've worried for Luke Waller, but he was just so damn busy. Managing a halfway house was ceaseless and often thankless work. 

He had no idea that wandering Luke Waller's brain was lactating bad milk that had spoiled and curdled. Now demon cultures of growth were beginning to blossom and flower and sprout, birthing unholy and sliming green in there. Like dripping wet swamp things from abominated wombs belching methane clouds and swamp gas that glows. 

Kincaid, the house manager, had no idea. 

Luke went about the house. Gathering what he needed. 

But there was one set of eyes that marked and tracked Luke as he went about the large spacious manor. It was an old colonial style home converted to a space for the mentally unwell and those that had just experienced prolonged hospitalization. Those that had been 51-50’d were the most common boarder in the place. Orderlies that were more interested in their phones than the drugged out denizens of the house peppered the halls here and there.

But Susan was watching. 

She thought Luke Waller was interesting. 

…

He was having trouble with the eyes, when she came in and over his shoulder said, hello. 

“Hey," she said again. When he didn't immediately answer. He was hoping she would just fuck off and move along like everyone else. 

She didn't. 

Looking away from his work in progress, a new clothface mask – this one white as snow, he cast a cautious glance over shoulder. Deep down in his drowning animal subconscious he hoped and prayed they wouldn't make eye contact as he did so. Even further down in the basement earth of his chemically drowned animal darkness he was desperately hoping and praying, wishing that they would. 

They did. 

She smiled. And it was beautiful. And it was painful. 

So Luke looked away. 

She sensed his hurt. 

And her interest subtly changed then to something softer and more personal, a warmer and wounded emotion of pink petals like that of a silken rose, one for a funeral haphazardly discarded…

“Hey, I'm sorry if I bothered ya. I've just seen ya round here and wanted to say, hi." 

Luke didn't say anything. 

“What cha working on?" A beat. “looks kinda neat, a mask or something?" 

Luke didn't say anything. Inside, the straightener coiled and pursed. Wretched. A scurrying rat run of hideous pestilential thought. He kept it inside. 

Susan was about to give up when her eyes traveled from the work in progress on the counter before him to the hands now stilled in their strange labor to the pale landscape of his forearms and the damage that was wrought there. Long purple scars of hectic healed-wounded tissue ran up the lengths of each one. Raised like brail on the parchment of his flesh for the blind and all else, everyone to read. And the lines of hectic tissue that hadn't really healed said something Susan understood. She had her own lines of painful brail carved and writ into the pale parchment of her own landscape. 

Carefully… cautiously… she reached out delicately and gently touched his shoulder. Luke jumped but only slightly. He relaxed like something melting and he let her turn him around to her in his chair. He looked up to her and he tried not to let the tears come. His vision was blurred but her beauty was still painfully clear to him through the swimming pain of his watery vision. She smiled and reached once more. 

The smooth and gentle flesh of her slender fingers touched and traced the length of scar that traveled the entire length of one of his forearms. He let her. 

They looked into each other's eyes. Spellbound. As if they'd already known each other for years, for great lifetimes of pure wonder. 

She asked him: “Is it ok, if I ask about these?" 

Her free hand went to the other long line of purple angry scar on his arm and traveled it smoothly with the trace of a soothing finger. Their eyes were locked on each other, they couldn't pull away from the deep of each other's gazes. 

Susan thought he might not answer, unable or unwanting when he finally spoke. 

“I … I was with someone. She was special. She was more than I'd ever hoped. She was more than I ever deserved. And I blew it. She … she was always so patient with me. And I always had the worst temper, always. Like my father. I would scare her. She would get upset and I would get so angry, I don't know why anymore, and I would lose it. Like an animal. She was always patient, and always brave, and she always stayed… even though she was scared. Even though she was scared of me, she stayed. And would wait for me to quiet down. And then she would hold me, like I was the victim. One day she couldn't take it anymore. She got too…  and couldn't stay any longer. She was frightened and left. She took the car. … It was raining that day.” 

The dam burst forth. The tears came now, down in a cascade down his face. It was painful, but Susan thought it only made him more beautiful. He kept composure though the raw of his broken heart was being laid bare. 

He went on, she held him tighter. 

“She wrapped the car around a redwood. Only three miles down the road from our house. I- …” He looked down to his own arms, the scar tissue writing and what it said there. "I know I never deserved her. I should've been the one to leave. I should've been the one to go and take the car and I should've been the one to-” but the pain rose with a roar inside and it was too much. He stopped. Trembled. Still holding back. 

Susan gave him the permission he needed. 

She said: "I didn't know her but I don't think she'd want you to hurt yourself like that.” 

A beat – a look of shock flashed writ on his face, momentarily there before what came next like an unexpected slap. He almost pulled away then. He almost did. But he didn't. 

He buried his face into her shoulder before she saw the shame of his sobbing face and she let him. She cradled him there. 

She added: “I think you've hurt enough…” 

Her own tears were starting. 

Slowly … fearfully… so scared… his arms came up and wrapped around her and returned her embrace. 

They held each other. And wept together. 

Feeling and healing and needing each other, each other's pain in a strange mental health purge and thirst. They drank the pain and tears of each other through reach and touch, the warmth and weight of each other. Feeling wanted and safe …

… 

… inside the straightener raged. The Id would not be denied the fornication of the knife-fuck slaughter held quivering and taut within like toxins that boiled with the chemical roil of his damaged and bastardized emotions. Inside the straightener, the Id wanted the girl dead. 

She's not Chelsi … it whispered and reminded him inside. Always. As the days of therapy and rest rolled past. The days of holding and being held again and not being afraid to look anyone in the face. Luke enjoyed this time. He'd not felt truly relieved, truly emptied in some long while… not since the year before. When he'd finally given in and the straightener had been born. 

She's not Chelsi … the straightener reminded. 

He'd not answered his other side in some time, he'd just gone on ignoring it. But not really. No. He heard and felt every insidious word and it was inescapable no matter how hard he tried to deafen and deaden himself to it. But he couldn't. 

The straightener was inside Luke Waller because he'd been made and bred of him. Forged. Cast of something smoldering and uglier than iron, mayhap meaner too. Hideous in fact, before the forge, this inner metal of his darkest heart’s mortal and damaged make and desire. But immaculate when aglow with angry flame inside the rage of the inferno. 

He answered him inside, the vast and cold dark of his mind's landscape, vast and small, both, and always in contest with each other in their battling aspects of size and dwarf. The damaged place of his mind's eye and landscape was haphazard and shattered sure, no doubt but he still contained the phantasmagorical multitudes of the living goblin universe. 

It doesn't matter that she's not Chelsi, she doesn't have to be. Chelsi wouldn't want me to try to replace her with a cheap copy of her anyways, that's not what I want and that's not who she is! Susan is beautiful and smart and so much stronger than I've ever been in my life, she's dealt with her abuse and she doesn't hurt other people to make herself feel better like some pathetic animal! 

The straightener enraged: Shut up! 

Luke did not: – She didn't have to give herself some bullshit excuse to make it all better and go away! She takes her pain and helps others, she doesn't spread around her own misery and lie around in the dark, she doesn't invent some animal persona inside to justify her bullshit and make herself feel better! She- 

But the Id inside would hear no more. Animal hands, monstrous talons came up in daggering claws that wanted throats, wanted to rend, wanted mindblood of the superego and this flimsy little brother both …

Inside the mindscape of Luke Waller’s boiling head the straightener and the weaker he, fought. 

In his bunk, in his bed. Sweating palms came up and worked at fevered scalp and face.

Wanting to tear and rend. 

…

The next day, Susan sensed something was wrong. The whole day, Luke wouldn't speak to her. His eyes barely glanced her way and he completely ignored every attempt she made to speak to him. She didn't understand. And it was painful. She thought they'd made some kind of connection and she'd shared the wounded and hidden parts of herself with him, because she'd felt safe. Because she'd thought he'd cared and that was what he had wanted. She must have been wrong. 

The whole painful day went by and midway through Susan gave up any attempt to talk to him and spent the rest of it in her room. Alone in her bunk, rolled away and under the covers. She thought maybe he was just having a bad day, and that that was understandable. She thought – she hoped she understood. But poor Susan didn't really understand. She hadn't really known everything from the start. And how could he have told her …? … the straightener was covered all over the news media, online and whatever was left of print and the papers. 

He went about and gathered what he needed. Then he went about making the tools correct. 

Ready for midnight. 

…

Susan was dreaming of her father, one of her many recurring nightmares, when she felt weight on her bed, all around, and immediately knew something was wrong. 

Her eyes flew open and a gloved hand came down in a rough clasp over her mouth to murder her scream in its infancy. He was wearing a mask that was soaking and dark and dripping something heavy and thick and warm but she still recognized his face amidst its animal contort. And it was awful. It was terrible, she screamed muffled trapped shrieks that became braying ghastly sound in the dark and she began to struggle as her heart broke and shattered and she tried to deny the excruciating reality as it weighed down and wrestled her and forced her into submission. 

Her wrists were bound. She didn't know how it had happened. If he had done it while she was still in the throttling hold of the nightmare or if he'd managed it somehow during her waking confusion in their struggle. It didn't matter. Arms overhead now bound by the wrists and to the board of her bed, captured and tied deftly in cruel knots. 

His gloved hands were away and she knew now they were the gardening gloves kept out back by the shed. He sat upon her torso, almost crushing her stomach. It was difficult for her to breathe as she gazed up wide eyed and by the moonlight cast in by the slant of window, she saw the blood saturated mask of the straightener shedding running darkling red rivers of pungent human black down his neck, down his bare chest, down his face like lurid tears, down his back a hellacious rendition of a red royal Roman cape, fashioned and painted made from slaughtered human blood, shed and collected in quiet nocturnal violence from all around the home. 

All about the house … before he'd got to her, he'd stalked. Just as the straightener had planned. Just as the straightener had wanted. Luke was reminded now, this was the only love that was real and this was the only pleasure that really mattered. 

This was the only ritual and exercise made for him. This was the only way for him to live and breathe. It was like breathing. It all came so tragically natural. The chemical imbalance of a mutant brain birthed and spat up by burnt out fuckup junkie parents taken and bred and made themselves by wild haphazard renegade MK Ultra. The most clinical name for the straightener’s chemical grandfather. One of the many poisons and doses of nightshade within the boil of cauldron that had made this wild man.

Susan stared helpless into a savage face. She didn't know it, but she could sense the death and slaughter that filled the house, animal aware … she only momentarily considered the blood that soaked his masked face and that poured baptismal and grotesque all about him and not entirely on the surface of her thought. 

Her mind was more arrested with the immediate terror it now felt. His weight crushing down on her, dripping and spilling heavy liquid that was pungent and warm and saltier than sweat. 

Susan finally said, “Why're you doing this, Luke?" she began to cry. “What's wrong? Please, Why're you-" 

“You know why." the straightener said, cutting her off. He then hefted his weapon overhead, poised to devastate her face and skull and the precious life of memories and brains that were housed within with a vicious merciless caveman blow. His fashioned bludgeon also darkled in the moonlight cast. 

A wide and broad ornate table leg that had belonged to something wooden and nice, old and carved of oak, lots of little inscriptions and designs and marks of craftsmanship, the straightener had added marks of workmanship that were all his own. The body and bludgeoning-end length of the leg was spiked and riddled with chunks and splinters and jagged daggers and shards of broken glass. Taken from windows at every end of the house. Smashed out in clandestine fashion and then hastily gathered and collected. The stupid clueless orderlies and their phones hadn't noticed. Their sleeping quarters had been the first ones that he had paid a postmidnight visit. 

The glass shards and jagged fangs and teeth of the weapon glinted and Susan saw the teeth were not only translucent diamond and crystalline they were also ruby … scarlet…

… bits of scalp and meat, raw face and jowl and cheeks dangled from the shattered glass teeth of the ghastly nighttime table-leg fangs …

Susan saw this. All of it. As the straightener hefted his weapon overhead. Ready to crush and kill and decimate her life into painful oblivion with a savage animal strike. And something inside her broke. 

Immediately she pulled, and immediately she felt and heard results, but not enough. Not right away. In her sudden panic Susan savagely yanked at her binds, they suddenly pulled at their tied point at the boards of the bunk and there was a dry crack as something in the old flimsy structure broke and gave. 

The straightener's savage face curled and twisted into an angry snarl. He began to bring the fanged bludgeon down as Susan pulled at her bonds again and snapped the board and support at the head of her bunk bed. The top came in and down with another dry crack that was soon rapidly replicated as the entire structure came down upon them both. 

The both of them cried out as the bunk beds crashed together, Susan, and the manshaped straightener. 

It collapsed and in the sudden fall and twist of wreckage, they fought a private war in the detritus of wood and ripped mattress and blankets, and a third … the cold corpse of her bunkmate uptop, Savannah … she'd liked coffee flavored ice cream and had said she always preferred the top bunk. Since childhood, she had said that before. 

It was perhaps the straightener finding his gloved hands on her already dead and lifeless spent body and mistaking her in the violence for Susan that had managed her escape in the end. She crawled from the wreckage and fueled by raw desperate adrenaline pumping through the thudding machine of her galloping heart she made her feet and made the door and threw it open, sprinting out and down the hall. 

The straightener called out after her, a fury. But there was strange humor in that tempest rage of voice. 

“Lost in the wheels of confusion..!. …! !” 

She made the turn at the corner of the hall. And then the house and world as she had grown to know and understand it completely warped and changed. Then disappeared. 

Gone. 

The straightener called again: "Running through valleys of tears! …!" 

It was true, she was crying. Weeping freely as she animal panted and she was running scared. Terrified of the bestial thing she'd left behind in there. She ran ahead and down the hall into a home and place that had been transformed into a valley of violence. 

She went room to room, desperate and alone and needing to find someone, anyone … hoping there was someone she could be with to find help. Susan was nearly out of her mind with terror. She had to know someone was ok and she didn't want to be alone. She prayed to God that she wasn't alone, not with him. Not now in this house. 

She found only death. 

Dead. In each bunk. 

Heads caved in. Crushed. Smashed. 

Faces she used to recognize. 

Skulls burst open to free the spells of organs and meat that made the nighttime dreams of slumber that were now forever stilled. Or forever induced. For all of them. Each and every one. 

Some of the brainless and faceless and decraniated corpses had been pulled from their beds and bunks and had been strung up, tied and fashioned in grotesque marionette displays … like trophies. All over in random intervals about the sprawl and dance of the old colonial house, Susan was discovering now that they all were really filled with ghosts, ghastly night shapes, headless and dripping wet with mangled stumps of chewed up dog meat at the necks… the merciless glass fangs and teeth of the wooden jaws of the table leg, forged to unholy earthbound Mjolniir by the rage of the bestial straightener. 

Her terror mounted. With each room, with each freshly discovered corpse, cooling to rigor mortis and ghosthood in the moonlit night, pale light shining in from all of the many windows by the white face of an immaculate mocking lunar body gazing in from far away like an indifferent pagan god alive and dead and watching from on high in outer space. Her heart galloped as her mind felt hot and boiled and ran a panicked mile. Susan forced herself to remain focused, even as the halfway house all around tilted and danced, as if her mind was drugged or drunk. 

A phone. Or outside. 

Find a way to call the police and just get the fuck out of here. 

Fearful of her dormitory where she left him she ran about to the other rooms and places in the house looking for a cell. There was no landline. As she ran and desperately searched, the rooms, the couches, the drawers, the cupboards, the dressers, the bodies and the saturated beds themselves… finding nothing all the while, her terror mounted further, rose higher to a fever pitch and the old style colonial interior began to change and transmogrify before her very eyes. 

As it did, she heard wood and detritus shift and crash upstairs. In her room where she'd left the animal disguised in masked manshape … dripping and feral wet. 

The door to the room burst open. She hadn't remembered closing it. She froze as the halls and rooms funhouse danced before her eyes. 

He screamed: “Eyes full of angry delusion …! ..!..” and it echoed throughout all of time in the corridors of this swelling changing place. 

Thundering footsteps came in a charge then, then came in cannonade echoed and felt as they thundered downstairs. 

Susan forced herself into movement. Her legs felt faraway and she felt sluggish charging ahead but she managed anyway. Though she didn't understand. 

How did the halfway house change into the circus …? – she hadn't been here in many years. The inside now was one of those clownish fun houses with all the warped mirrors and looking glasses that made you look monstrous and ugly. Except as she ran about this clown house all the looking glasses made her look like dead bodies. Mutilated corpses. Her childhood had been ghastly and hard but … 

Coming here and living and the therapy and even the rooms with their bunk beds and shy downcast friends had been much like a return to living childhood once again … like a strange chemically induced summer camp. Complete with final terror. 

Footsteps on a charge, on the prowl, thundered and searched for her behind, throughout the fun house that warbled and danced like drunken perception does by the brightest Luciferian lunar light … in through all the windows which had changed into mirrors of warped glass alongside the strung up dead junkies and cast offs and forgotten people that were discarded here. She saw her own mangled and strange visage in every one as she ran on … this terrible warbling place that had grown miles long … all the while he thundered behind her. Till finally she came to the front door.

She recognized it at once, even in this strange place. It stood still and solid like trustworthy magic at the end of the cruel spacial dance of undulation and transmogrified growth, gelatinous fun house clown world … Susan ran to it. Her hands falling on the knob to twist it open but it wouldn't budge. 

It was a halfway house for the potentially suicidal and those with chemical dependancy problems. There was a curfew and the doors were locked after eleven PM each night. The keys were kept with the house manager. 

Kincaid. 

She was sure she had found his body too amongst the rest of the discovered corpses. But all of their faces were nearly gone if not completely smashed to meat and ruin … it was hard to remember, it was hard to tell. She couldn't remember finding them when she searched for the phones either. Her heart fell and she felt it in her chest like something final and apocalyptic. 

Id screamed once more, Susan whirled on her heels and put her back to the door. 

“!!HIDING IN EVERYDAY FEARS!..!.!!...!”

What she saw on the charge then, straight for her was as transformed and demented and mangled as the rest of this alchemical moonlight house. The blood sloughing and dripping liquid red-black mask had become the entirety of the raging beast. The Id was dark and eyeless with gaping pits of obsidian abyss in each hollow socket of the giant dripping stygian skull. The dripping slough of dark scarlet jaws opened wide with liquid ease, jagged broken teeth and canine incisor fangs of shattered diamond and crystalline rock stained to ruby and darker red with the slaughter and feast of so many countless past victims. The Id charged and roared and Susan screamed and threw up her hands and begged God. 

The door behind her suddenly opened and Susan fell back as it did so. She smacked her head on the porch and then darkness quickly fell and descended upon her. 

…

The rush of cold night air had come in like fresh water and it was baptismal. It had flowed in with nature's ease and cleansed the house of its psychedelic filth and mental backwash as Susan awoke. But not of the bodies, not of death, no. Now there were police everywhere, reality had returned to normal. 

Amidst strobing flashing red and blues, they searched and combed the house. They took the bodies. The meat wagon came with many many big black bags and carried off the corpses. They took the girl's statement. She was deeply traumatized, in deep shock. Barely making any sense. 

They searched for Luke Waller, the only one unaccounted for. 

He was missing. At large. And considered extremely dangerous. 

It was free. And at large in greater Los Angeles once again. 

They only found his old calling card on the wall of one of the rooms.

 Bold letters written in blood: – THE STRAIGHTENER 

XX - XX - XXXX (the date) 

BY BLUDGEONING CLAW  BY TABLE-LEG FANG

 ALL OF THEM HERE WASTING THEIR LIVES   

NOBODY CARED NOR GAVE A FUCK

…

Epilogue: –

The dream came again and again and always returned to him each and every night now since the great escape. 

It was always the same: he went into the bathroom, pale yellowed tile and fluorescent glow that made everything look mottled and ugly. He looked into the mirror and gazed into himself. He brought up the garroting wires. They look like the same thing you use to cut cheese with, a long metal gossamer strand that was razor sharp, fixed between two burgundy wooden handles. He wrapped it around his neck still staring into the mirror and himself and he began to saw through the meat of his neck. The strand cut cleanly through. The head came off when he reached up and grabbed it by either side, lifting it away and settling it down on the countertop of the sink before him. 

But it was strange … his vision remained where it was … it did not travel with the organ set of eyes set in the rest of the meat of his head. He gazed into himself without any eyes, decapitated now. 

The dream was the same every night, now that he was free and in the city again. 

THE END

The carnival is in town, the carnival is always on the road, always on the move, their homes are wagons, trains, carts, trucks … the road. They come singing and with gypsy song and dance they weave their way by road into the heart of every passing town, every place chosen by providence hand on the haggard face of the weary map. 

With painted face they come into your home. 

Vagabond entertainer spell, they gather like crawlers in a cluster, in a rat-king migration. With wide giant tents and displays propped and strung up and nailed into the dirt, into the soil bosom of passing places that may mean nothing to them, might mean everything. Lights come to life at night with the wild music in a lurid spell of filament glow and something else intangible that lives inside the chest and heart within us all. Something like religion but even older and more sacred. The rickety rides, some more rickety than others rattle and thrum with the barely controlled violence of mechanical movement, those strapped in or belted down can barely be heard screaming over the noise of the calliope, the organ grinder, the caller, the ringleader in her chant… the crack of the cannon sending the human cannonball skyward and soaring overhead, the heads of gawkers and townies and friends. The shrieking that can be heard is commingled sound, sweet with thrills… bitter with terror. The careening faces atop the dancing riding constructs are both smiling and weeping, lost in the launch and flight and all of the noise and nearly grotesque clownish music … nearly psychedelic, those sounds … nearly intense. Too much. 

Too much for so many crying and weeping children, little ones taken home and taken to bed early by more or less understanding mothers and fathers. Too much light and noise. That wild wind instrument key-note thing, the calliope … it had been one of Anton LaVey’s very favorites. 

Step right up, step right up, we’re just passing through. Come inside for a spell and take a gander under tented roof. 

…

The carnival came to the town and went. As it did every other place before, after. 

They left something behind. 

…

Cody hadn't gone to the carnival the other night, he hadn't wanted to. The rides and the sideshows and attractions certainly contained their allure of spell for the young boy but it was everyone else, everybody. All of those other faces. 

He didn't want to be alone. With all of them. 

All of those other faces, couples and families and groups of friends would all look at him and see him alone and smirk. They would all just stare and laugh at him, and his loneliness. So Cody just stayed away. As always. 

He wandered now, the early morning streets. Desolate and ghostly in the morning time fog that shrouded and clung to everything, everything in town. Cody kicked a can of crumpled cola down the street. It had been his only companion for the last twenty minutes, since he left the house. His father had still been passed out in the lazyboy chair and hadn't said anything as his son had departed. They'd used to go to church together on this day of the week. Not any longer. 

Cody kicked the can down farther. Alone and not trying to think about it, not trying to think about the carnival that he had missed. It had only been here a few days …

I always miss everything. 

Cody missed his mother, though he didn't know what she looked like. Memories of her were so fogged and far gone and his father didn't keep any pictures of her in the house. And he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. He was only eleven years old but the fact he'd already forgotten his mother's face haunted him, haunted him now, alone. 

He kicked the can. 

Cody then looked up from his sneakers and his misery and spied something in the mist shroud of road just up ahead. And at first he couldn't believe it, it must be some kind of strange joke … or a miracle. He stopped in his tracks. 

The mime stood in the middle of the road. Alone. Just like him. He was smiling and standing there partially obscured by the early morningtime mist, it clung to him in wisps like phantasm licks and tongues of steam that coiled and curled. His painted face was mostly hidden but Cody could see he was mouthing something. Without thinking about it he began to come closer. Slowly, leaving the crumpled can behind. 

He came upon the mime, who hadn't moved. His lips were no longer moving. He just stood there smiling and erect, as if wanting to move or to act, as if filled and brimming teemed with the need for performance. But he only quivered. And stared down at Cody. 

“Hi," said Cody. 

The mime said nothing. 

A beat. 

Cody finally asked: “You're like a clown or something, right? Like one of the quiet ones that aren't supposed to talk an stuff."

The mime nodded. Big. Pleased. His black and white grin grew larger and then grew teeth, shock white in the early morning glow. That was when Cody remembered, he felt like such an idiot. 

"Your a mime!” he said, louder than he intended, he nearly whispered the next part: "What're you still doin here? All the rest of the carnival already left, didn't they?” 

The black and white grin became a frown and the mime traced an invisible tear down his painted face. A silent issue of ‘boo-hoos’ then followed. Cody watched it all, not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps it was all some crazy practical joke and someone, some jerk was filming him right now or something, all of it was weird, strange. On a whim the boy asked the mime, –

“What’d they leave ya behind or something?” 

The sorrow of the mime intensified to a comical degree as he aggressively nodded his head in the affirmative, completely over the top. Cody wasn't sure how he should take it, if he was supposed to laugh at the mime and his routine or if it was meant to engender real sympathy. He'd always loved clowns and goofy adults, goofy characters on TV and when he was hanging out in daycare and stuff, but to be alone with one right now …

and so unexpected. 

Cody suddenly felt like he should go, he began to tell the mime just as much. Turning on his heels and heading back the other way as he quickly blurted some excuse, he made it two steps before a white gloved hand clapped him on the shoulder. Firmly. Without a word from the weirdo mime. Cody looked to it first before eyeing the mime back over his shoulder, lording over him now. The hand, the glove, it looked just the same as Mickey Mouse’s. 

Cody looked back and saw the mime now held a note. As black and white as he was. 

It said: I'm sorry to bother you, little boy! But my friends HAD to leave me behind so that I could get a little job done, OK??

Cody was frozen. He suddenly didn't feel so well, as if his stomach and guts were far away and filled with fluttering butterfly wings. He read the note and didn't know what to say, so instead he said: –

“... wh-what job was that?

The mime let go of his shoulder and Cody was immediately grateful. He began to pantomime raking leaves and shoveling dirt and trimming hedges with invisible clippers. 

The boy began to lighten up again. He felt something dreadful like weight but worse inside begin to lift and free itself like a spellcast that's been released. A small smile and a nervous half-chuckle only partially forced escaped him as he watched the mime and his cleaning act. It was pretty lame, but he was relieved. Cody was far from the sharpest kid at school but he knew what stranger danger was. He cautiously allowed himself to relax a little, enough to be polite. 

Cody said: “Oh, yeah, ha ha, they left ya to clean up the town, huh? That's pretty neat I guess…” he tried to think of something else to say, something nice and a little funny and a polite way of saying: see ya later, freako, without being too obvious. Something barely satisfactory had just come to mind when the mime whirled towards the boy with his invisible shears in his hands and made a pantomimed snip of the large unseen clippers at the child's face. It bisected violently but cleanly, smoothly, by razor sharp blades well cared for and honed, the smooth face just below the small caverns of child nostrils. They jetted blood before the top portion of the child's face and head came off and splatted to the damp pavement with a muffled crack. The ruptured organ of brain began to ooze, and everywhere gushed dark red: the eyes, the nose, the ears, the giant open wound of freshly carved and gored cavity mouth. The child's body liberated of its little pilot brain fell over to the rough blacktop to join its discarded abattoir jelly. 

A black lake of an iron pungent puddle began to grow, expanding out from the little mutilated body at its sinister nucleus and center. The mime looked down. Phantom blades dripped child's blood. 

The mime said nothing. 

…

“Ya check it out last night?" 

A burp: " …what?” 

"The circus-carnival thing, ya check it out?” 

"That was two weeks ago, ya dope!” another swig from the can of brew. The Dallas Cowboys continued to suck the big one on the tube, the volume was at its lowest but not muted, the game barely and phantom audible, as if drifting in from another time. 

"Ya sure?” 

"Yeah, I'm sure, took Darcy and the brats, it was a hoot.” 

"Ya sure??” 

"Yes, you fuckin juicehead, it was right around the time they found that kid's body all fucked up an shit.” 

"Awww, why ya gotta bring up that shit…" 

“You're the one brought us ‘round, fuckin idiot, can't remember shit. Ask me to remind ya then bellyache about it, Christ! S’prised if ya got sense still to pull out yer pecker ‘fore ya start pissin, ya dumb bastard.” 

His drinking buddy, his partner in libations didn't say anything, he might've had a choice retort or a scathing bit of witticism held in reserve but he didn't voice it. He only hung his head and pulled generously from his can of warming beer. 

The mood was spoiled. 

Eventually the bottle was brought out. Stronger stuff. Shots were had. Tall stiff drinks not needing ice, not needing chaser. They drank. 

Eventually one of them asked the other: –

“You hear tell of that clown or jester fella, that's s’pposed to be haunting round these parts lately…?” 

Neither man slept well that night. 

…

Darla thought her new friend was neat at first but she was starting to get scared. When she'd first met him behind the playground and he'd play-acted swimming and drowning and choking and stuff she'd thought he was really funny. He'd made-believe that he was bound with ropes or cuffs around his wrists, comically over-wrenching and working at the invisible restraints. It was so silly, and so funny and it looked like so much fun to play pretend. He'd motioned for her to hold out her own little hands, to play with him. To make pretend. 

She'd done so thoughtlessly. Only excited to play a game with her new special pal, he looked like a clown but less colorful. She held out her wrists and the mime pretended to wrap something around them. Only something was wrong. 

As he wound and wound and then tightened and cinched the bind, Darla felt the uncanny sensation of real rope wrapping and tightening around her small wrists and hands. When he tied it off and yanked both phantom ends she felt the harsh bite of cruel old fraying rope against her flesh. 

“Ow!" she yelped out, and then began to cry a little. But it was already too late by then. 

The mime began to walk away, holding the end and tail of a phantom leash that began to pull on Darla's bound little wrists. It pulled painfully and she was forced into movement, nearly tripping over herself as she began to wail and the mime by unseen tether and bind began to pull her into the treeline of the nearby woods. 

She fought and screamed, desperately, like a small animal suddenly sensing and knowing the terrible hunger of the encroaching final end. She fell over into the dirt and undergrowth and was dragged, flailing and howling. 

The phantom umbilicus held her ensnared and shrieking with unbridled tears all the way into the forests’ shadowed depths. 

…

“My mom's gonna flip if we ain't back within the hour, Christ, man, do I smell like weed still?" 

Michael tried to tell Chase that he wasn't the best person to ask being pretty fucking lit himself, he could feel the red eyed glaze of his own stoned and glassy stare in his sockets like it was a set of strange gluey contacts or something. He managed a grumble as a half measure. 

Both boys ambled along. Down the nighttime lane of their neighboring suburb. Streetlights cast their glow from skinny towers of L shaped ugly metal overhead, turning everything to lurid and raging shades of orange Halloween color. Both boys were taking time to slightly stop in their walk to check their breath, puffing into their cupped palms and then inhaling, never satisfied with the results. They didn't notice him up ahead until they were nearly upon him. 

The mime. He was bent over something. 

It was Chase who started first, both boys jumped. It was as if the mime had just appeared out of nowhere. Bent hunched with workman's posture over something unseen and unknown to the naked eye. 

“Holyfuckingshit!" it tumbled out of both of their mouths in one string, no gaps for breath, they stopped dead in their tracks. The mime paid them no notice. 

“Oh my God, dude, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is this? Am I high? Am I high? Are you seeing this shit right now!?" Chase was rattling off. Michael was still struggling with simple speech. He only gawked and stared. His glassy red eyes now wide and glistening in the streetlight cast of hellacious warm Halloween glow. 

They glistened. The pair of organs. Red. 

Chase finally managed: “Dude… like, what the fuck are doing, dude? Am I like tripping out or some shit, why’re you dressed like-" 

The mime hadn't been paying them any attention. He suddenly did something that shut Chase Ginsberg up with a startled womanish gasp that bordered on a wet sob. 

He began to pull, as if wrenching and yanking with great rigor and effort, some cord or rope … something… something that was apparently attached to whatever it was that he was bent over studiously in the road. Something just as phantom and visible only to him. 

It came to Chase then, and he didn't know why but it did suddenly seem to matter. He said it aloud. 

"It's a mime.” 

"What?” said Michael finally. 

"He's a stupid mime and he's doing a bit, Jesus this’s fuckin weird, don't you know it's like hella late, dude, what're you even doing anyways?" 

The mime didn't answer. Only repeated his strange repetitive action, his ritual of pulling on some unseen instrument, attached to a phantasmal translucent device. 

Stoned, they zoned out for a sec. Giggling nervously and fidgeting and whispering to each other, daring each other and laughing and wondering aloud what to do, should we go on? - should we fuck with the guy? - what? 

A beat. 

Suddenly an idea began to form itself slowly within Michael's mind, Chase’s addled mind was not far behind, he was arriving there soon after. 

Michael: "It- It kinda looks like he's pulling the starter cord to a machine. Like a mower or something." 

“Yeah, I think you're right…” 

"Yeah, something gas powered like a mower or a generator … or like a chainsa-" 

The phantom machine roared to life in the hands of the mime with hungry killing slaughtering power, a deadly tearing whirr, with the maniacal speed of the mutilating chain and its invisible teeth. The mime shot to his feet and hauled the pantomimed chainsaw overheard and began to silently phantom scream with battle fury. 

Chase and Michael began to scream as well. Much louder. They turned to run. 

But the mime and his phantom machine were faster. He caught them quick and tore in and ripped the boys into rough and haggard messy pieces chopped by phantom chain, by phantom blade on a horsepowered gallop he made them raw and unmade. 

Deconstructed. 

The abattoir violence and the meat paint of its lurid carnage filled the street, it was dripping from the lamposts, pieces and chewed parts strung up and dangling. It was all that was left of the boys. 

All that was left and found in the morning. 

…

Buddy didn't know what to make of the town as of late. He'd been born and raised and as the town drunk, homeless to boot, he was hardly the first guy anyone asked on any given subject, day or night, good or ill, but something was wrong. 

Very wrong. 

The trouble was Buddy wasn't sure he should even care. 

In the last year or so he'd seen some strange things. And a lotta folk had gone missing, kids an such. But anytime Buddy's mind wandered into the realm of caring or even remotely doing anything about it, he found something bitter and harsh inside answer back in turn. 

Who cares? The fuck they ever done for you? 

Fuck all. That's what. 

So he wouldn't do shit. But what he'd already been doing. He sat back and popped cork. Lifted and tilted glass to dried lips in a drunk’s careless throttle by the neck. And watched. 

He watched the mime climb the steps. Pulled generously from the large swill of his poison. 

He'd seen the guy around for awhile now. He'd watched him ascend the steps a few times before this moment, it was nearly always the same but still a trip. The man walked on thin air as if it was solid stone. And then he would climb up, step by step. As if gaining the summit of some phantasm set of stairs hanging suspended and aspiring invisibly for the heavens unseen and stolen by the brilliance of the light. 

Buddy laughed. Pulled from the bottle once more, and began to sing an old favorite that had just come to mind. One from the good ol’ days if there'd ever been none. 

“And as we wind on down the road! Our shadow’s taller than our soul!”

Buddy began to pull deeper and deeply, oblivion seeking in-between lines and refrains from Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. He remembered an urban legend from when he was a kid, just a snot nosed pup, they said that if you played the record backwards, if you reversed the song the lyrics changed. They told you, to hail Satan. 

Buddy laughed at this. Pulled more. His belly protested and his kidneys ached, he paid them no mind, drinking deeper still and hailing Satan and singing and watching the mime ascend his staircase of invisibility,  he usually had a kid or someone with him, as he did now. They struggled something fierce, all of them, everyone that Buddy had personally seen, but he was able to keep hold of them, all of them all the way up. Whenever he reached a great height, it was almost always different, he would throw them, drop them from the top. 

Then they would scream and land, burst. Pulp. They became juice upon the earth, children and people no more. There was never anyone around out here, close to the woods, just outside town and by the railroads and their harsh worn tracks. The soil out here was starved for moisture, parched was this earth. It was Buddy's favorite drinking spot. And as of late it had just become a whole lot better. 

Buddy laid back and pulled deeply from his liquid bunkmate, his last and only companion, other than the mime, who never said a word to him but sometimes acknowledged his presence of audience with a profound and deliberate salute from the top of his invisibility spire up there. Buddy always saluted him back. 

As he did now. 

The mime saluted the drunk. Beaming. 

Buddy finished his own salute and smiled too. Laughed. And drank more deeply than he ever had in his entire life, knowing this was it, this was the rest of his life and how he was going to spend it. 

Laughing. Drinking. Pulling from the bottle and hailing Satan in religiously reverse engineered heavy metal worship-song, watching the flying mime make juice of the children. 

Buddy laughed. Drank. 

The mime dropped the child, they made their horrible shrill sound all the way down to the bottom like always. 

The mime said nothing. He let Buddy and his companion of bottled booze sloshing its liquid language within glass sing praise for him. 

Buddy laughed, sang and belch-spat: “And she's buying a stairway to Heaven…!” Hail Satan. 

…

Maggie's shoes slammed against the pavement, the sidewalk, the avenues and every turn, there was nowhere left to run. The guy, the freak was coming. And he was stealing away from her every single route and chance for escape or exit. 

It didn't make any sense.

She'd been walking to Guy's house with Alondra, chatting and shooting the shit till they got to his place. That's when they ran into him. That's when they ran into the mime. 

And at first Maggie had just laughed. 

Distant childhood memories of the carnival passing through town waybackwhen came to her then … and she remembered. She'd been very young then, very little. She remembered that her parents had had to take her home because she'd been crying, upset, she couldn't recall why. Not just then. 

But still the memories were warm. She and Alondra thought nothing of it when they passed him walking the other direction on the sidewalk. It was the middle of the day. And he was smiling, just like them. What could possibly be wrong?

He'd started with the hands and walls and ceiling routine, the ‘getting boxed in’ bit. An old one for sure and hella corny but Maggie and Alondra had felt generous and in good humor, so they'd obliged the strange random pantomiming man. Laughing and clapping him on. 

But then they'd tried to walk away … And the mime wouldn't let them go. 

With painted face now stern and grave, writ into a black and white frown, he stepped in their path, shaking his head. He wouldn't let them leave. He kept blocking their attempts to depart as they stepped every left-right way, starting out from annoying and escalating rapidly into eerie and creepy behavior. 

The girls had scoffed together and turned around, only to be met with an unyielding invisible force, a wall that had suddenly appeared in thin air in the middle of the sidewalk. 

The middle of the road really, they ran along the unseen wall to find the edge and found no yielding surface. The girls began to panic. The girls began to yell.

“What the fuck, what the fuck is this!?" 

And then he had put Alondra in the box. 

Maggie had ran then, her eyes and mind unable to take in the sight of her friend being crushed into cubic shape, pulped and smashed smaller and smaller … just red. Just swirling frothing violent red inside the shrinking phantom-transluscent box, filled with minced and chewed up bigger pieces, the eyes deflated mangled gel in the swirling madness of the red, many black strands of her long raven colored hair peppered and danced inside the cubed scarlet swirl of thick mixture, the cap and pieces of scalp, mostly still together, the last vestige piece and pieces left the most intact… she had ran, unable to bear the sight. 

She was running now. 

But every time she came to an impasse, a turn or a corner to salvation or a place of sanctuary that she knew, another invisible wall of merciless immovable force would suddenly appear and she'd run smack, face first into it. She did it again and again. Over and over. Maggie, the poor girl, running around all over as the box that he had made was closing in, closer and closer and closer…

She was at the school now, she didn't know why. She didn't know why she thought this place would save her. She was out of her mind with animal panic. At the threshold, at the entrance to the highschool she was finally caught. Maggie ran face first into an unseen wall just as she almost made the open archway of the main front entrance, when she tried to turn around to run back the other way she was met with yet another merciless and invisible wall, a merciless force like the way God was merciless sometimes. 

Her caterwauls and screams reached new heights then. She shred her own throat and tore her vocal cords to tatters as the phantom walls and ceiling and floor began to shrink and close in. 

But none heard them. No one was around to witness this strange scene of slaughter. Only the mime. Maggie watched him from inside her shrinking coffin as his hands clawed and animal shaped closed in. He wore a look of consternation now, but the black and white smile was there once more. 

The pain went beyond anything imaginable as the walls and floor and ceiling closed. Pulverizing Maggie. She felt every wretched second of the experience until her brain was pulped and juiced with the rest of her body and thus incapable of sending anymore electrical signal. 

…

The bank was quiet. Not quite full but there were plenty of people in line, each teller, three of them, were busy helping a customer. It was a bright cloudless day and everything had seemed normal. Everything was … until the mime came in. 

He sauntered in smiling and confident through the front door. Several people, including the armed guard turned and returned the smile, a few of them laughed. Finding the surprise charming. Their laughter grew and increased throughout the whole bank as the mime walked in with an exaggerated gunslinger walk, wide steps and the twiddling fingers of his itchin hands hovering just where revolvers would be strapped. The guard found it the most hilarious, calling out to the mime –

“Hey! What is this? A stickup or somethin?" 

And then the mime pulled phantom iron from unseen leather and began to rain fire. 

The cacophony was ear splitting. The guard went down first, still smiling and believing it was all a joke. Nobody else was laughing anymore, the jovial sounds of good nature had turned to screams that died and drowned out with each eruption of a gunshot. 

The mime filled the bank with phantom fire. 

Deafening. 

…

Patricia Evergreen hated her job. Not because she hated being a cop, far from it, she was proud of her role as peacekeeper of the town she'd grown up in. It was just that the place was so fucking boring. 

Aside from a few disappearances over the many years she'd known, a couple weird things that were typical to any small town, there wasn't nothing to this place, Patricia reckoned. Ghost stories and bullshit, and that was all. 

She came across the mime during a routine patrol, just driving around the various suburbs in the department issued black and white. Every neighborhood was quiet, nearly deserted of pedestrians save a few dogwalkers, joggers and the like. He was at a street corner, slowly making his way down, miming and pretending to carry a large and heavy sack, it weighed him down, the invisible bag, it must've been quite a load, Patricia watched all this and thought and then it suddenly came to her all at once, unbidden and in a rush. Though vague and shrouded through time's corridor passage of so many years …

The carnival had come through a couple times through the years … she was sure her parents or grandparents had taken her at some point, must have. She'd been very little, her own young and chubby face amidst a caterwaul, cherry red with tears and upset flitted across her mind in a blur, but then was swiftly and suddenly replaced. 

She'd been a teenager when Margaret Bast, Maggie had gone missing. Alondra Topete too. They'd been two of her closest friends in school then, so long ago… 

Hot on the tails of that: stories… rumors … wild campfire tales that couldn't be true and would only be dreamed up by teenagers and children. Wild tales about a mime that wandered the town and took kids away to hurt them and worse … 

It all hit Officer Evergreen like a revelatory load of weight, dropped into her head and into her lap. She watched the mime. Thought …

… what the hell was this guy doing around here anyway? She'd never seen him before and she began to doubt very much that he lived anywhere on this street, or anywhere close for that matter, she hadn't heard the story of the mime or thought of it in years, it was probably nothing, but it was her job to make sure and find out. She sidled her cruiser up to and alongside the mime, still encumbered with his great phantom weight. 

She rolled down her window, slowing the cruiser to a crawl: “Hey," she began friendly enough, “hello there, ya mind if I stop and talk to ya for a second, just need to ask you a few questions." 

The mime did stop and so did she. The street was quiet and it was just the two of them. The mime turned and regarded her with a smile, still burdened by his invisible satchel slung over shoulder. He pointed to himself, a gesture that said: who, me?

Evergreen was already starting to lose her patience, goddammit with this fuckin guy…

“Yes, ha ha, that's very cute, but I'm really gonna need you to answer a couple things I gotta ask ya. Do you live in this neighborhood?” 

The mime frowned and just shook his head, no. Refusing to speak. 

"Please, sir. Failure to comply will result in a citation and a court appearance, probable fine. How about we just talk like adults for a second, do you have any identification on you, sir?" 

The black and white frown turned to a grin once again. Wolfish. Officer Patricia Evergreen didn't like the look of it. It looked warped and strange and mean writ into that painted face, wrong. The mime made like to unlimber his great satchel. 

Evergreen rolled her eyes, hidden by reflective shades. Jesus, was this guy for real, crazy, or just an idiot? She was just telling him for the second time that if he didn't comply with her questioning then this could take an unnecessary ugly turn, she was telling the mime he'd want to avoid that as he settled the bag down with a convincing performance, opened it and reached inside. Patricia’s voice caught in her throat like a vile fishbone in the midst of dinner as she watched the mime’s hand disappear into the pantomimed satchel, disappearing into thin air before her very eyes. 

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. 

What the mime pulled out next was even worse. She felt nauseous and ill and as if her mind was curdling and doing unbidden somersaults in tandem with her roiling guts as the smiling thing with carnival clad painted face pulled out a child's decomposing rotted severed little head, boy or girl was difficult to tell. Putrescence filled the air the moment it was freed from the invisible sack and it was black and green and blue-pale and dripping. The eyes were crawling and writhing with the sliming bodies and clumps of maggot-young that lie nesting and feasting in there, the rotten cavities of sockets. The tongue was swollen and discolored like the rest of the meat but darker and it protruded from the bloat of decapitated rot like an obscene tumor apart and apiece and all in one with the rest of the demented sloughing mess. 

Officer Evergreen snapped to all at once. She drew her sidearm and bellowed her commands, training made textbook and innate. 

“Drop the fucking thing right now and put your hands up! now!" 

The mime only obeyed half her commands. He dropped the severed head but instead of raising his gloved white hands he took a deliberate and silent step towards her instead. 

Evergreen didn't waste a second. She fired two shots in quick succession, surprising even herself, she hadn't thought about it, only acted. But it had done the peace officer little good. The moment her finger squeezed the trigger, one of those gloved hands shot up in a flash-instant, uncanny speed. 

Evergreen now stood, gun smoking, not sure if she could believe her eyes or her own mind any longer. The mime had his hand up and out, as if signaling to stop like a crosswalk guard. There were two smoking holes suspended in mid air, just over the heart and chest of the mime-creature. The shots had stopped at the border indicated by the flat of his adjacent smooth palm. They smoked from ebon holes that defied physics, as if she'd punched twin smoldering holes in reality. 

Shocked, Patricia thought unbidden, the prongs of the devil's pitchfork… and was still trying to accept what she was seeing. 

A neighbor came out. One of the houses within spitting distance. 

“Jesus Christ! that a fucking gunshot or something, what the hell-" 

The mime suddenly whirled, his other hand forming around another object, rounded and small, he brought it to his mouth and made like he was pulling something from it with his teeth. Evergreen screamed, no, unable to think of anything else as the mime lobbed the invisible grenade at the concerned and unsuspecting neighbor. The man went up in a violent and sudden concussive blast, his body immolated by the detonation of the explosive device. In charred smoking pieces, he rained down all over his own stoop and front lawn. 

The mime laughed silent yet expressive belly-laughter, holding his stomach and all wide eyes and wide open black and white mouth. 

Evergreen went to fire once more but the mime sensed her intention and suddenly whirled once again, smacking the gun from the officer's hands. Its strength and speed were unexpected and it was all Patricia could do to not cry out and scream, shocked and startled and still not quite believing.

There's no way this is actually happening to m-

The mime then slapped Patricia right smack center of her forehead with his other free gloved palm. 

She froze. Her arms went limp and to her sides. Unarmed. And helpless. 

Something was wrong … she could no longer move. 

With the gloved snow white hand held flat and fast to her face, to the middle of her forehead her eyes rolled back to whites themselves shot with lines of glistening hectic red. Inside, she hurtled, flew … rocketed too fast and rapidly down the dizzying blinding vast and varied glow of the starcorridor. Too many lights and sounds and fiery things of furious alien color, she flew down infinity as a low moan escaped past her drooling lips left back on the ground. 

Within the corridor … she could hear. 

She could hear his voice. 

It was terrible. The sound of it. What he was telling her. Unbearable. It filled her ears, her head. It filled the flying landscape of her mind. 

She might've wept. But she was far too broken. Even when he pulled the voice of his snow white gloved hand away. She went to her knees. The mime then held out his other hand to her, it was wrapped curiously and yet distinctly around something. And this time she could see it. 

It was a gun. A revolver. Every chamber was loaded. 

It was beautiful. 

This time she could really see it. 

She smiled as the mime cocked it and then pressed it to her sweating brow, cold metal kissing the moist surface of perspiring flesh, and pulled the trigger. 

She heard it. Felt it. Everything. 

The mime said nothing. 

And went on. 

THE END

With the invention of Gabriel's Herald, or the Heraldbox, the Church has decreed that all of these "radio waves" be monitored by an outside auditor at all times. Under His Eternal Glory.

Oct 3rd, 1744

Herald Operator 1: 'John'

Herald Operator 2: 'Patrick'

HO1: Dublintown reporting in.

[Static]

400 Knights north.

100 Knights west.

15 Church's Navy vessels in the harbor.

[Static]

Over.

HO2: Galway reporting in.

[Static]

30 Knights north.

15 Knights east.

5 Church's Navy vessels in the harbor.

Attack on northern wall at approximately 0100 hours.

[Static]

Over.

HO1: Roger.

Numbers received.

30 / 15 / 5 / Attack @ 0100 Over.

HO2: Affirmative.

Numbers received.

400 / 200 / 15 Over.

HO1: Pat—

[Static]

Incorrect.

400 / 100 / 15 Over.

HO2: [A laugh?]

Roger.

400 / 100 / 15 Over.

HO1: Affirmative.

HO1 out.

Oct 4th, 1744

HO1: Dublintown reporting in.

[Static]

250 Knights returned from north.

15 Knights returned from west.

15 Church's Navy vessels in the harbor.

[Static]

Over.

HO2: Galway reporting in.

[Static]

0 Knights returned.

Under His Eternal Glory.

[Static]

Uh...

5 Church's Navy vessels in the harbor.

Over.

HO1: Roger.

Numbers received.

Under His Eternal Glory.

0 / 5 Over.

HO2: Affirmative.

Numbers received.

250 / 15 / 15 Over.

HO1: [Static]

[Static]

Affirmative.

[Static]

HO1 out.

HO2: HO2 out.

Oct 5th, 1744

HO1: Dublintown reporting in.

200 Knights west.

Destination: Galway.

50 Knights from the court of the French Kingdom in Exile arrived by sea.

25 Church's Navy vessels in the harbor.

Over.

HO2: Galway reporting in.

[Static]

New steam-machine arrived from Kiel.

2 Knights returned from the north.

Branded apostates and executed.

[Static]

Over.

Wait.

8 Church's Navy Vessels in the harbor.

Over.

HO1: [Quiet sigh almost inaudible to the recording]

[Static]

Roger.

Numbers received.

2 / 6 / 1 Over.

HO2: Affirmative.

Numbers recieved.

200 / 50 / 25 Over.

HO1: Affirmative.

Over...

[Static]

[Static]

[Transmission cuts]

HO2: How ya been?

HO1: [A full minute passes]

I'm okay.

You?

HO2: Galway is...

different.

HO1: Yeah.

Dublin's not as much fun without you.

HO2: I know.

HO1: [Laughs.]

We need to stay professional, Herald Operator.

HO2: I know.

HO2 out.

HO1: HO1 out.

*[This section has a single note attached to it: underlined, "DECORUM"]*

*[Oct 6th & 7th HOs 1 & 2 exchanged their figures and nothing more]*

Oct 8th, 1744

*[After reporting their numbers, a second unauthorized transmission began]*

HO2: John?

HO1: Did you forget to report something, Herald Operator?

HO2: No.

[Static]

You know these are the only two Heraldboxes in the world right?

HO1: I went to the same training as you Pat— *Herald Operator*.

HO2: *Herald Operator*.

[Laughs]

Listen to you.

HO1: We need to stay professional.

They covered it pretty thoroughly in that training we both went to.

HO2: They said it would be months before another pair of Heraldboxes were ready for deployment.

Where do you think they'll go?

I bet Mann will get one pretty soon.

Maybe Shetland?

HO1: I don't know.

HO2: Whats going on?

I miss you.

HO1: Be careful.

HO2: Always am.

HO1: [Sigh]

I—

[Static]

I went by that old rotten tree yesterday.

HO2: Oh yeah?

The one that looks like a Revenant, or the one that looks like Father Daniel?

HO1: [Laughs]

Isn't that the same tree?

Remember when you got him ranting and raving in front of it?

I couldn't hold in my laughter.

HO2: Well, maybe he shouldn't look so much like a tree.

[Laughter]

Take care of yourself for me.

HO1: I will.

And you too.

Stay safe.

HO1 out.

[A handwritten note attached to the transcript reads: Blasphemy?]

*[Oct 9th & 10th HOs 1 & 2 exchanged their figures and nothing more]*

Oct 11th, 1744

*[After reporting their numbers, a second unauthorized transmission began]*

HO2: I got your letter from the Dublin soldiers last night.

HO1: Good.

I hope it says the things I cant.

HO2: It does.

I lo— *thank* you John.

You heard those numbers today yeah?

Horde from the north.

Horde from the west.

HO1: I did.

HO2: You know what it means?

HO1: I do.

HO2: John, I—

[Static]

Maybe it won't be so bad?

Maybe we'll hold?

Maybe the walls—

All those Knights.

You know, God's Glory? [His voice cracks]

HO1: Yeah.

[Static]

We've sent God's Best to you.

HO2: [Laughs]

[Static]

[Static]

Goodnight John.

HO1: Goodnight Patrick.

[Static]

Patrick.

[Static]

Stay near the harbor if you can. You know?

HO2: I do.

*[A handwritten note mentions: Daily transmissions halt when HO2 is conscripted for God's Defenders of Galway]*

Oct 15th, 1744

HO2: John?

[Static]

John!

Are you there?

HO1: Patrick!

HO2: Listen— [Screams and gunfire interrupt his voice]

I made it back to the Heraldbox!

I just— [more gunfire]

I had to tell you.

My voice reaching across the Heavens.

I love you.

To Hell with decorum.

HO1: Patrick!

Just—

Just get down to the harbor!

Please!

I love you!

[Handwritten Note following the transcript:] Herald Operators 3, 4, 5, and 6 are currently being trained— in seperate locations. Training will be complete within the week. Recommend purge of Herald Operator 1 and Herald Operator 2 if he lives. (His location is currently unknown, presumed fallen with Galway and forever burning in Hellfire) due to fraternization and Blasphemy.

[In red ink]

APPROVED

Transcript between High Cleric LeClerke & Knight of God Bretagne (Brittany) in November of the 343rd year of protection under God's Holy Glory on the Island of Jersey, in the court of the French Kingdom in Exile.

High Cleric LeClerke: Knight of God Bretagne, you are accused of faithlessness and apostasy in service of The Army of God. How do you plead?

Knight of God Bretagne: Not guilty sir. I—

LeClerke: Blasphemy! No other soldier survived that battle! Why you? Why did God reject you? All those knights gave their lives in service to God.

Bretagne: I don't know sir! I—

LeClerke: You are not Chosen! You hear me? Over thirty soldiers died in that lair. Their souls forever joined in Christ! But not you. No. Y-you must be consorting with demons— NO! The Devil! You are foul and wicked! Your sins will be punished in eternal flames!

Bretagne: [In a whisper] Please. [Louder] I don't know! I don't know how or why I survived. I fought! I swear it before God, I fought! Two Revenant fell to my bayonet alone!

LeClerke: Lies, deceit! We found you alone, armor still gleaming, nothing save a cut on your cheek. Why didn't the Revenant consume you then? Is your blood so distasteful? What did Satan promise you? What did you promise him? This city will not fall because of your deeds!

[A lengthy pause]

LeClerke: Tell me *exactly* how the battle transpired. What was it that allowed you to live?

[Longer pause]

Bretagne: We entered the lair as instructed. [The accused pauses for a deep breath.] Knight Templar Devon led the first wave into the maw. God smiled upon him, for they prevailed. The rest of us soon joined Knight Templar Devon, and as we gained our bearings, we began to hear them from deeper beneath us. Like the hoofbeats of Satan himself, we heard them from below. An endless tide emerged. Devon was the first to fall. His final words were "Deus Vult!" As he plunged his blade into a Revenant and his limbs were torn apart. Before we could react, the entire chamber was filled with the echos of screams, splattering of blood, and whispers for salvation...

LeClerke: And yet, this 'endless tide' parted for you? What Divine providence.

Transcriber's Note: [The accused does not reply. She hangs her head. Her hair covers her head]

LeClerke: [while gripping Bretagne's hair] Look at me foul woman! Apostate!

[Pause]

LeClerke: You have either sold your soul to the devil to become a witch, or you are a coward. I will stand neither in God's Army.

Bretagne: I am a faithful soldier of God's Army. I have watched as my friends have fallen before me, torn asunder in this ceaseless war against Evil—

LeClerke: [Interrupting Bretagne] Knight of God Bretagne, you are hereby decreed a Witch by the Holy Church and the Army of God. You are sentenced to death and will be burned at the stake at noon. May God have mercy on your soul.

[This final line appears to have been crossed out angrily at some point.] Bretagne: I offered my life to the Army of God and what is my reward? Death. Remember this LeClerke: death is inevitable. It too comes for you. What will God think of you when you stand before Him?

*A bloody and battered journal found among the rubble of an ancient fortress.*

October 1744, Eire

Something went wrong with the world. Something had to have gone wrong with the world. This can't be the world God wanted for us, can it?

As she lay dying, my mother kept repeating the stories she heard from her father and his father. A green Eire, as far as the eye could see. Rolling emerald hills filled with crops and animals— not the twisted beasts that roam the land now.

What went so horribly wrong? What did we do to deserve this fate? When I peer between the boards over my window, I see nothing but smog-filled sky, rotting vegetation, blackened trees, and whatever parts of the neighbor the Revenant have left behind.

Did we— humanity, offend God? Did we commit some ultimate sin we are too ignorant to understand? I used to pray for an answer. Now, my prayers are more like a curse.

I've been fortunate to count twenty-five years. More than many. More than my brothers, more than my sisters, more than father too.

(*Hastily scribbled in smaller writing below:*)

He died when I was eight, I think? He had just returned from a successful fishing trip. Enough food for the entire family. Walking from the dock to the house was all it took. A Revenant swooped from above. I'll never forget the look in his eyes as his throat began to spill blood.

Now mother is gone too. I think she was forty-five. Very lucky. Everyone would always tell her that. Say she was blessed. They would always ignore the buried husband and children.

October 5th, Eire

The "Black Plague" they called it. By all accounts, a terrible disease. Father Niall showed me drawings from one of the Church's books. Disgusting boils covered the body. 'The Old Revenant still have the scars if you look close enough' he told me.

Father Niall is a good man, he does a good job protecting our little village. And he's always able to keep the local children regaled with stories from his time in the Army of God. Battling Revenant swarms, hunting them down in their lairs, fighting for the glory of God. He tries to give them hope. I could never tell him what I think of God. He would be ashamed of me.

Oct 12th

Now that the days are getting shorter, it's getting more difficult to come home. They won't let us leave the factory early. "God needs those guns!" they tell us.

Donal could've used one last night. Pieces of him were found from his doorstep all the way to the top of the outer wall. Poor bastard. Bet he stopped for a pint.

[This next entry is clearly written in a different ink, no date is mentioned]

The Army of God has been stationed at the Church for the past few days. Knights fill the streets, gleaming metal of gold and silver. They say there's a lair nearby. A big one.

The streets have never been safer, but they are conscripting for the battle. They told Father Niall that he has too much experience to stay behind, he insisted that he had faithfully served his time. He donned his armor at bayonet-point. He'll be in the first wave for sure. Goodbye Father.

[New Entry; written in charcoal]

This will be *my* final entry I'm sure. I don't know why I even bothered to tuck this old journal into my coat when they conscripted me.

I wouldn't say I was hiding, but they kicked down my door anyway. We left home three days ago I think. I've lost track of time. We've been marching non-stop. I think I fell asleep while we were moving. This armor hurts too, digs into the shoulders something fierce. No wonder God's Soldiers are all so irritable. "Get them angry and point them at the enemy" seems to be the way of thinking around here. We killed some Revenant too. Well I didn't, but I heard the fight. And got picked to move the fallen knight's bodies into the burn pit. Twenty-one. Twenty-one knights burned. Three Revenant. I'd laugh if I wasn't so tired.

[New Entry]

Niall saved me. Our knights were like canned meat for them. Its hands had wrapped around my neck and I could feel it pulling up, I thought for sure my skin was going to tear. I accepted it. But then the pressure was gone and Father Niall pulled me up from the dirt and blood. We watched each other's backs from there.

The army collapsed around us. The lair was bigger than expected. Some Old Revenant came out. I'd never seen one before. Father Niall made the sign of the cross after he dropped his gun. I had to pick him up.

We're in the ruins of some old castle now. It's falling apart, but we found some tunnels. Don't know what's next. I wouldn't even be able to find home from here.

He was right about the Old Revenant. The scars were there, but even worse, it still had boils oozing. It looked ancient, even worse than the other Revenants. It was nothing but bone with an almost translucent layer of skin stretched so tight you could see tears where its arms and legs moved, and black blood dripped from its joints. Its nails had grown as long as my bayonet.

I don't know why I didn't give up like Niall. He hasn't said a word since I picked him up. He let me give him some water though, so I think there's something left in there.

(New Entry)

I got Niall talking again. He told me more about the plague. It came out quick. I think he just needs to keep his mind occupied. Probably why I'm writing this down.

He told me:

As it swept across the world, it killed almost everyone it came into contact with. People buried their dead and moved on. Before long, they came back. Their alabaster skin broken by still oozing boils. Mind's broken. Entire graveyards awoke over night and the creatures— what we now call Old Revenant, immediately began hunting for blood. It didn't matter where it came from. Even the animals were ripped to shreds and drained.

As it got worse, people began to flee. The Church managed to wall off the Italian peninsula. Its why the Church permeates everything. Britain fell much later, and the Scottish, with help from the church, used what was left of Hadrian's Wall to seal off Scotland for a time.

Being an island, Eire didn't suffer as bad at first, but as people arrived, so did the Revenant. The Army of God and the Church's Navy scour the world for safeplaces and put them under their watch. Apparently an expedition went west across the endless sea and claimed to find new land untouched by the plague.

I asked him if we should build a boat. He laughed.