Classical Darkness

The Lord Of The Hall

In my cold hall,

Left alone to endure winter’s chill,

I listen to the from the fountain fall,

Falling, falling, further down the craggy hill.

 -

Cascading down upon rock after rock.

Down through the stony ravine.

Down past the lonely shephard’s flock,

And finally past that sorrowful mill.

 -

That sorrowful, pitiful, sorry excuse for a mill.

 -

It has not always been this way.

My hall used to be filled to the brim with travelers,

Drunk and boasting.

We would slaughter a lamb from the shepherd’s flock,

And we would tell tales sitting by the fire roasting.

The mill was well used.

And the granary well stocked.

 -

It is no longer that way.

Our lands we misused,

and now my words hold  little sway.

No travelers in my hall tonight.

No warm love of my life to whisper sweet nothings in my ear.

My lands are strewn in ruin and desolation.

My only friends: the night, the dark, and fear.

 -

Never again will an industrious man live in my lands.

No more miners.

No more war makers.

No more life takers.

 -

Never again in my lands.

There will only be me.

And the shephard and his flock.

We will receive no more boastful travelers.

Or plan unravelers.

Humanity can leave me and my lands alone.

It is better this way.

 -

In time, the land will heal.

And I will die.

 -

Another will come and repeat my mistakes.

And they will become as I am now.

 -

I will fall into legend and lore.

A legend for all the flesh I tore.

And for all the gore I spilt on the ground.

They will sit in their lonely halls.

Without a traveler at their sad, broken door.

And they will all die like me.

Without a sound. 

The Man From The Desert

There was an abnormally cool night on the fifteenth of June this year. This in itself is unimportant but the arrival of Mr. Nebuchadnezzar on that same dark day has forever engrained it into my mind.

            He was a tall man, with broad shoulders and dark tanned skin. Deep lines were set into his face, and his graying hair and his demeanor created this sense that he was a lone survivor of some ancient civilization. He certainly was a sight to gaze upon with his elegant dress and ethereal like glow that seemed to emanate from the jewels embroidered into his garments. As Sheriff I took notice of his arrival, but he posed no real threat to the town as he owned nothing but his clothes and a very large tent that was carried on the back of a camel-esque creature. I only observed it from a distance but there certainly was an… uncanny quality about it. He set himself up in the vacant lot in town and came to me to secure the rights to do so. I was struck by his bizarre but elegant manner of speaking. I set him upon the right path and by the next day he had purchased the lot. But after he had done so the camel creature disappeared. I had meant to inquire as to its whereabouts but I didn’t. A combination of awe and cautious interest paired with a disturbing sense of dread in his presence and my personal xenophobia kept me interested but always distant.

            Rumors slowly began to build up that he was a communist agent sent to corrupt the people. These were easily dismissed as slander but nonetheless the town began to fear and despise the strange man. This fear that controlled the town, and myself, seemed to be nonexistent in children. They could often be seen playing near the lot but rarely actually in it. Parents would flood my office demanding that I do something about Mr. Nebuchadnezzar’s corruption of the children, unaware that the only actually wrongdoing being done was the occasional trespassing on the part of the children themselves. I still do not understand why the children were magnetized to the man in the lot. At the time I thought it was because their parents avoided the lot and they wished to escape their reach.

            It was on October seventh when the tension snapped. It began in the early afternoon when a parent hit a child playing in the street near the lot. I could see it all from my window down the road as the driver accelerated to speed by the tent when they struck the child. The car stopped momentarily, then sped off down the road. I ran through the station yelling for someone to call an ambulance but there was no one there to hear me. All the deputies were gone, vanished. I took fleeting notice of it as I sprinted down the road. Nebuchadnezzar had emerged from his tent and was standing over the tiny body glaring down at it with blazing eyes. He reached down and lifted the child up and caressed it as he turned back towards the tent. He took notice of me rushing towards him and he motioned with his hand for me to head towards the tent, which I did as if controlled by some power that outweighed all my fears and desire to get the child to the hospital.

            He laid the child down on the floor in the center of the tent and turned towards the tent’s rear and began calmly going through a chest he had certainly not arrived with. I was panting and out of breath but I tried to tell him that we needed to take… “it” to the hospital but the words seemed trapped in my throat; instead I simply gasped for air and examined the body. You could no longer tell the gender as the face and torso had been destroyed to a point where calling the hospital would just be a waste of time. The hair was matted with blood and the left arm was almost separated from the body, lying in a grotesque angle from the torso. What struck me was how unnatural the fragile body seemed bent, ripped, and crushed beyond the point of recognition. Nebuchadnezzar turned back towards the child, eyes burning and his ethereal aura becoming borderline malicious. He placed down stones around the mangled body and circumscribed it with a circle of chalk before placing his hand on the bloody crater that was where a face would be. He whispered words in a language that to my knowledge doesn’t exist and the dead body jolted in a horrifying manner that will haunt me all my days as the disconnected arm swung about as the other reached up towards Nebuchadnezzar trying to grab him as he stepped back. The body continued to flail but it seemed pinned from pursuing him. The disfigured face turned towards me and I made out the remnants of an eyeball looking at me, cognitive and in agony. It gave off a scream from the depths of hell as it slowly started to regenerate. The cartilage of the nose reformed, flesh and teeth combined to recreate the mouth and lips as skin slowly grew from the fringes of the face until I could tell that it was a girl , not older than eight or nine. The arm grew back into its socket and the muscles readjusted back to their former positions. It may have taken all of ten minutes, but it felt like an eternity. When she was healed Nebuchadnezzar wrapped her in a blanket and handed her to me before turning back to his chest. I stood in shock unknowing what to do or how to process what I had just witnessed. He turned his head and looking back with a smile he motioned with his hand for me to go. I’m not sure if it was the shock or something else but I followed the command and exited the tent.

            My mouth gaped as I stumbled down the street towards the station. A boy stood on the corner and in place of the normal curiosity there was a strong sense of reverence and solemnity about him. I reached the station and set the girl down on a bench in the hallway before calling her parents. When they came they berated me about how Nebuchadnezzar had caused the accident. I tried to explain what he had done but the words simply wouldn’t form. I was still in too much shock to comprehend what I had seen. Never once did they question their daughter’s condition.

They left in a storm of hate pulling their daughter by the hand. She was in more shock than I was, blankly staring at the world like she couldn’t understand it anymore. I returned to my office and just stared down the road. The sun was setting and I watched as a mob formed and moved towards the lot. Then the earth shook, and a great fissure opened up in the middle of the roadway and consumed them as they tried to seek shelter in buildings or climb onto signs. Then the earth simply closed back up, and there was no noise except for a raven perched on a stop sign in front of the station. As the final rays of sunlight disappeared beyond the horizon I could make out Nebuchadnezzar walking down the road alongside his beast, with all the children following him into oblivion. I saw all this, and did nothing.

The House That Made Hybrids

Normal, boring, and decent, Gerald Fassbender was an intelligent young man. He still had the normal and quiet fear of things that he did not understand, and small spaces. Once when he was little he had been locked in a closet by his older sister and she left him there the entire day. This one slight occurrence was the only thing that anyone could point to as being out of place during his development as a human being. He was raised by decent parents, in a decent neighborhood, and he was by all means, a decent young man. He was so completely and utterly normal, that his one phobia was the only thing that really gave the man any depth at all. Ever since then he had been incredibly claustrophobic and he avoided small spaces at any cost. He refused to use elevators or small restrooms, ignoring any inconvenience that this might have caused him. His mind often completely ignored the possibility of going into small spaces, and he avoided them like the plague.

He had just finished his term at University and he was making his first wide-eyed steps out into the real world. He traveled from town to town, state to state, and even province to province (there was a short detour to Canada), till he finally found a nice town called Kroyhaven. Not too big, not too small, it was a perfect fit for Gerald in that it was incredibly boring. He was hired at the local high school to teach history, and he promptly set about to finding a place to settle down while he tested out his new profession. Teaching inAmericathough is not the most profitable of pursuits, and for a single young man housing at such a low income posed a difficult question. He was prepared to take out a loan to help make a down payment, though he did not relish the thought of adding to his remaining student loans. Fortuitously for him, he found a small double wide trailer that was not too far from the school, and he could purchase it for a measly sum. Not to be made a fool of, Gerald asked around first to make sure that he was not walking into a bad deal. The trailer was fine. The previous tenets had been a young couple, one of whom was obsessive compulsive, and it had been kept in pristine condition. The couple had been the last in a long line of tenets who had rented the trailer, and the owner was simply tired of finding new buyers every six months. When asked why the tenets moved out so frequently, the various citizens of Kroyhaven whom Gerald spoke to said that they had no idea. No one wanted to stay in a double wide trailer for too long they supposed, which seemed like an accurate observation to Gerald.

He moved in during the middle of June, just after school had let out. He took a part time job at a gas station to keep him occupied until summer ended, and he did not find any issue with his new home at all. It had been altered to look like an actual house, and the tenets before the couple before him had planted small bushes around its edge and a nice little tree in the yard. When he was not working at the gas station he would eagerly do yard work or write up lesson plans for the coming school year. All in all things were going smoothly for Gerald, but like most men he began to get lonely. He had a nice girlfriend in college, but they had broken up after two years when she could not take his dull normalcy any longer. He had not really looked into another relationship since then, but now that he was out of college it seemed like he should try to find some companionship. Unfortunately for Gerald, Kroyhaven had about as many places to meet women as you would expect a town named Kroyhaven to have. So he took the next logical step and adopted a cat.

It was a jet black mouser; black as any charcoal or any cave beneath the earth. The gentleman at the Humane Society awkwardly informed Gerald that the cat’s previous owner had abused him and jokingly named him “Niggerman”, which made the man very uncomfortable, due to him being of African descent himself. On the sheet that detailed the cats characteristics it stated that it had been found locked in a cage with its dead mother and its deceased brothers and sisters. As a result the cat was terrified by cages and small spaces. Gerald could not help but fall in love with the creature. He assured the man that the cat would get renamed at once. Gerald, being the amazingly original and interesting man he was, called the cat Blackie.

This is when unusual things began to occur. To this point he had been sleeping on the far west end of the house in the largest bedroom. Blackie and Gerald slept there together every night until Gerald began to consider converting the room into an office so he could pursue writing. He did not do it immediately. Instead he let the thought linger for a few nights before taking any action. It was out of character for him; he had never written anything more than he had to during college. The sensation gnawed at him though, and finally he gave in. There had been a weight pulling down on him while the thought was on his mind, and once the rooms were converted the weight was lifted and a surge of enthusiasm prompted him to seriously pursue writing as a hobby.

The new bedroom was all the way on the other end of the house. It was the second largest room and it had more than enough space for his bed. The only real difference between the new room and the old was that each wall in this new room was covered in an intricate black and gold wallpaper that smelled very faintly of sulfur. Gerald actually liked the smell though, and he thought that it and the wallpaper gave the room character. Blackie did not accompany him though. He simply refused to go into that room during the night, and whenever Gerald tried to bring him in forcibly Blackie would hiss and squirm out of Gerald’s arms and claw at the door until he was let out. This was most distressing to Gerald, for he had grown fond of Blackie’s company while he slept. He tried to coax him in with food and toys, but no matter what Gerald did Blackie refused to enter the room during the night. Even more puzzlingly though, and infuriating for Gerald, during the day Blackie would happily follow Gerald around the house wherever he went, even into the room in which he refused to sleep.

June passed, as did July, and Gerald spent his days evenly divided between his job at the gas station, his yard work, and his writing. He wrote an original novella about a woman detective who solved murder mysteries inLos Angeleswhile playing by her own rules.

Then August finally arrived, and by the end of the month Gerald was properly introduced to the teaching profession. Immediately he despised it as any sensible person would. The children of Kroyhaven were despicable in every way, and they thought that simply because Mr. Fassbender was a new teacher they could get away with anything. Unfortunately, they could. Simply put, Mr. Fassbender was not cut out for this job. He tried being their friends, but that was horribly unsuccessful. He attempted being stern, and that did not work either. It was comparable to a chess match and Gerald was horribly outclassed by his students. Every day they were three moves ahead of him, which was somewhat ironic because of how far behind they were in their lessons. These immature abominations had such a complete lack of respect and manners that Gerald began to think that they were raised by Neanderthals instead of normal human beings. He was appalled at how messy they left his room, and he was embarrassed by the looks the janitorial staff gave him at the end of every day. Each night Gerald came home ready to punch a whole in the wall, and within the first two weeks he did.

Quickly he began to have difficulty sleeping. It was then that he started to pick up on what was keeping Blackie away from his room. It sounded like scratching; like tiny fingernails clawing into wood. Gerald would lay in bed every night, staring at the ceiling and listening to the nails slowly grinding at the floor beneath him. It was so faint though. So faint that he could not really say that it was more than his imagination. During the day it stopped, and when it did Blackie would often come into the room and begin to snuggle up against him.

The month of September passed, and the scratching persisted. It was constant, unceasing, and it seemed to be becoming more intense. Worse still Gerald could put a pillow over his head and it did not seem to affect his hearing at all. The noise of nails scraping against wood all night; every night, was slowly carving into his mind. He was barely getting any sleep, and every day the little shits at school gave him evermore trouble. His writing was gradually becoming more original. The murders were becoming more complex and his prose was becoming more detailed. Now he abandoned all pretense of teaching, and handed out worksheets and wrote assigned reading on the board. He sat at his desk thinking about murder, how to improve his writing, and the noise under the house.

Rats where down there; he knew it. Tiny little rats with tiny little nails scraping away at the wood trying to get at him. They were just as annoying as the rats at school, and just as impolite. All of them needed to be wiped out and then Gerald would finally get some sleep. He called the exterminator right around the beginning of the month. The man in the red jumpsuit spent three hours underneath the house in the crawlspace looking, but he said he did not find signs of any rats. In fact there was a very large black snake down, and if there had been any rats the snake must have eaten them a white ago. Gerald insisted that there were rats; great big ones with long nails. Of course he had never seen them, and he refused to go up under the house with the exterminator. The man just shrugged and said that he would put some poison down there, but there were no rats.

October seemed to drag its feet in leaving. The weather was unpleasant, and generally life seemed horrid to Gerald. The students continued to harass him at school, and one group of pranksters had somehow gotten a hold of his home phone number. Blackie was also beginning to add to Gerald’s woes. The cat began to scratch furiously at the walls and hiss wildly during the nights, and the damage he was doing to the house was bad enough that Gerald was forced to buy a cage. This did not keep Blackie from making all manner of horrible noises during the night, so Gerald put the cage on the far end of the house in the writing room. Still though Gerald wasn’t getting any sleep. He would simply lie in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to Blackie in his cage on the other side of his house; and the scratching beneath his bed.

On October 31^st the odd goings-on stopped. The scratching beneath the floor ceased, Blackie remained calm throughout the night. Even the pranksters left Gerald alone. Unaccustomed to this sort of peace, Gerald was even more restless than usual. He made his way to the writing room and released Blackie. The cat hopped up onto his lap purring as Gerald typed away, pumping out another grisly adolescent murder. Gerald’s focus was completely on the screen, his entire body tensing as he imagined sending a hammer through a teenager’s skull. He finished the passage, and a feeling of euphoria went over him as he read his newest masterpiece. Gerald felt warm sweat running down his neck and forehead. He looked down at Blackie and brushed his hand over the cat’s head. After a long moment of just listening to the sound of Blackie purring Gerald gradually stood up from his chair, the old cat hopping off his leg. Gerald felt dizzy, as if he had stood too quickly. The world around him did not seem real anymore, as if he had wandered into an uncannily realistic dream recreation of his home. His bedroom pulled him towards the other end of the house, the smell of sulfur perverting the air of the entire home. On the wall over his bed a strange glyph shifted and glowed, its shape altering with every passing moment. Gerald stared blankly, the trance still upon him. His arm rose to touch it, and for a brief instant intense heat scorched his fingertips. Then he was back in his writing chair, listening to Blackie howl and scratch at the wall, and beneath it all the faint sound of movement underneath the house. He bent over his desk and screamed, madness racing around his mind. That exterminator had ripped him off; the man had just wanted to con Gerald out of his money. There were rats down there, and as winter came on they would just try to get into the house even more vigorously. Blackie was a mouser, and Gerald was going to have him do some mousing.

November came. The scratching was growing louder now, as if there were more nails and each had a more intense purpose. He knew they were trying to get up at him through the floor. Trying to bring their diseased little hands up to infect his home. Blackie starved for a few days, Gerald keeping him locked in his cage to get him nice and hungry. The cat just meowed and looked Gerald with wide, confused eyes, unsure of what he had done. After four days without food while being trapped in the same kind of cage he had been in with his brothers and sisters terrified Blackie, and when he saw his friend open up the crawlspace Blackie in, finding himself in the darkness as the door closed and locked shut. Gerald could hear the cat inside, meowing and trying to get back out; trying to reach Gerald. Blackie would have to kill the rats if it wanted to leave though, and Gerald was not going to change his stance as he had with those kids.

That night, when Gerald lied in bed, he waited for the sound of nails against wood, and the scratches never came. Just before sunrise, he heard it. Not nails against wood, but words. Faint words, and he did not understand them, but words nonetheless. Gerald sprung up from his bed and called the police. When they arrived he told them that he had heard a man’s voice from underneath the house, and the crawlspace was still locked so there was no way he could have gotten out. One of the officers crawled in a little ways to shine his flashlight, but that was quickly followed by yells and cussing on the part of the officer. He had crawled right over the rotten entrails of a cat which had been ripped apart and strewn all over the place. When they asked Gerald what had happened he told them he did not know. He did not own a cat.

From that point on there was no more scratching. Only mumbled words every night at random intervals in between sunset and sunrise. Gerald would yell for them to stop but they never did. His very essence seemed to be leaving him, his body becoming weaker and more malnourished with every passing night. The thing underneath the house continued on though, every night continuing with its horrible oratory, becoming more verbose with every passing night.

The first snowfall came early that December. It was not much, but it was enough to cancel school. Gerald just sat at home, writing more horrible literature about how much he hated the vile bastard children of Kroyhaven, and how if it were up to him he would send them all into a woodchipper and pour their blood into a swimming pool. His writing became more depraved and horrid as the snow bound him in, and every night he would listen to the man under the house mumbling horrible words. He needed out.

On the night of the solstice, late into the evening after the mumbling had began, Gerald was leaving to go to the grocer to buy some milk, bread, notebook paper, and pitchfork to spike a child’s head on. However on his way to his vehicle he noticed that the crawlspace door was pushed open. One of the kids had been hiding under there! He knew it! The pranksters had been after him since the start, trying to make him slide into insanity by whispering strange words to him. They had not succeeded though. He had caught them now, and he was going to make them pay. He rushed after them, not noticing that the only tracks in the snow were his. He was going to kill them. He was going to rip them apart and leave them for the rats. He was going to tear out eyeballs stuff them in their mouths. They would have to chew them if they wanted him to let them go back home to their parents. His arms pulled him all the way to the other end of the house, up underneath his room. The crawlspace was empty. No children, not even a winter rat huddled beneath the house for warmth could be found.

Gerald screamed and yelled and cursed the entire town, ranting about how they messed with the wrong teacher. His voice began to go hoarse, and his phobia came back to the front of his mind. Breathing suddenly became difficult for him in that cramped space, and his eyes frantically looked back at the crawlspace door. When had it been shut? He tried to crawl back the way he came, back towards the door, but no matter what he tried he could not find the wall. The sound of his sister snickering on the other side of the door when he was a child came rushing back to him, and he curled up into a ball and wept.

The murmuring began slowly by the half formed tongue. Speaking in some strange demonic language that Gerald did not comprehend, something was pulling itself along the ground towards him. Gerald kicked at it, his hand digging into his pocket and withdrawing his phone. He used the light that it cast to see what monstrous thing was assailing. The pale, wrinkled body of a man pulled itself towards him. Its hands were already on him, wrapping around his legs and arms. He struggled, breaking free and kicking at it again. Its speech grew louder, and it grabbed at him once more, this time pinning Gerald down. He felt its teeth biting into him, ripping at his flesh, gnawing at his side and scratching at his face. The smell of sulfur was intermingled with the smell of Gerald’s blood and the pale thing’s damp flesh, and through the darkness Gerald could faintly see a red glyph moving in the room above him. The creature was on top of him now, every moment seeming to grow stronger as Gerald became weaker. Gerald’s elbow collided with the fallen phone, sending light back into the crawlspace. A deformed version of himself peered down at him with mangled nose and saggy lips. The last thing Gerald saw before the light went back out was that the creature did not have his eyes. It had the eyes of a cat, and it had cat’s teeth. 

The Labyrinth Of The Sadists

Prologue

Screams of bloody terror echoed off the walls. Disoriented and frightened, the young woman ran as fast as she could through the onyx hallways. Behind her strange creatures rushed, their deformed humanoid bodies more adapted to the cramped enclosure of the labyrinth. With each turn they gained ground on her, and with every passing moment the finality of her situation became clearer. When their muscled hands wrapped around her body and flung her to the ground, all she wanted was for them to kill her quickly and end this ordeal before any more horrors were inflicted upon her. Her wish was left ungranted.

 Her body was mutilated and deformed. Her skin regularly lacerated and torn from her body, the woman was forced to devour her own bloody flesh each time her captors decided she was due for a new flaying. Not once did she every lay her eyes upon her tormentors, for the first time this unholy practice was performed her eyes had been ripped out of her skull and the optical nerves were torn free. The eyes had fallen onto a dusty stone floor, before they were crammed into her mouth, her captors forcing her to bite down and chew them.  

Skinless, eyeless; the woman no longer had any semblance of feminine appearance. Instead she bore resemblance to some sort of tormented ghoul or demon as she screamed inside her pitiful excuse for a prison cell. It hung over a bed of hot coals at the foot of its cell, and it was only ever let down from its rack so that its mangled body would be burned by the intense heat. The dust and soot and ash pressed against her dripping flesh and clung to it so that the homunculus was given the look of a harrowing apparition. Then it was set loose into the hallways of the Labyrinth.

Whether it was from the fire that it was hung over, the flaying of its skin, the burning embers that were placed into its empty eye sockets, or just the pain of its miserable, meaningless existence, the monster was constantly shrieking in pain. The sound would start off low, down in its ash filled lungs before becoming more powerful, growing exponentially till the outburst ripped through the air out of its chest like an audible hurricane of suffering.

After centuries of torture and the most barbarous forms of mutilation specific to her gender the young woman who had found herself within the labyrinth had truly become a genderless monstrosity. The toll that her torment had on her mind is unfathomable by sane men and women. Only a select few of the insane could even come close to comprehending the vile sensation of such a horrific existence.

It is no surprise then that on the few occasions it was unleashed that it brought with it the wrath and bestial nature of a tormented animal set loose. It was not hateful. It was never angry, sad, or depressed. And it is likely that the entire spectrum of human emotion faded long ago amongst the torrents of agony and despair that wrapped and warped its mind. Perhaps this was for the best though, for such an abomination’s existence would only be unbearable if any other mental state were the norm. The only emotion that could be claimed to remain was fear. Only the savviest of its torturers had been able to ascertain its presence, for it is no small task to notice fear on a creature without a face. Still though sometimes it was there, and you could hear it in its shrieks as it was lowered down onto the hellish fire over which it hung.

Unleashed upon the halls and passageways of the Labyrinth, it skinless body embraced the nature of its existence. It was a gloriously horrific spectacle to its captors as it skulked about and screamed in pain. It became the violence that was inflicted upon it. Given the chance it would blindly and clumsily return upon any damned soul that crossed its path the uttermost capacity of pain available to it. In doing so it became the physical manifestation of its tormentors’ desires, and it slew all that it met in the hallways of the Labyrinth.

Above the doorway to the cell where the being was kept was one word. Xenaphon. Otherwise nameless, the creature was sometimes called this impassively by its captors as they flayed the skin from its body.

And it was one of many.