by James Havoc
Eternity passes from cup to cup. The beast's lights are dwindling, dissipated by crawling agents of chaos and nightmare. The remorseless scorpions have started to hack through his alabaster underbelly, pincers ripping the skin as if it were silk. Julian relaxes at the first warm, dark splashes of blood; even the most brightly halo'd carry shadows in the soul. Huge clots pour down next, then the guts, and endless collars of steaming bowel; cloaking him in humid darkness.
Nothing left of Billy but a drawn, lacklustre hide extruding from the planet Queen.
The pine lid slammed shut, sounding briefly. Old Nutcracker toiled away, spreading layer upon layer of damp earth; with weary hands he tamped down the very last spadeful, sundering daylight and sleeper for all Time.
V : THE VENUS EYE
Coffinbound, Lovechild experienced the upper world by setting forth her left eye, Lucifer, on a supernatural leash. Prowling the local village and countryside, Lucifer would home in on sources of energy.
Countless young lovers succumbed to his cyclopian inquisition; his favourite trip was the spiral down orgasmic spines. He could report the crackling voltage from a masturbating nun, then fly to embed himself in the hot arse of some farmgirl riding a jackanapes. At such times, Lovechild found Lucifer hard to control; senses overloaded by that unquenchable pupil, she would often have to struggle to retrieve her unrelenting spy. When she was finally back in blackness, the lid of her oblong box would suppurate with a mucal condensation, as if it were flesh and she the parasite within. Her face stank of lightning.
One sweet Autumn night, as Lucifer cruised the cobbled streets, hard beneath the gas-lamps so as to light his mistress' prison, he detected a prodigious incandescence emanating from one of the shuttered shops. At once he flew to its thatched roof, down through the rafters, and into the sparsely-furnished attic. It was instantly apparent that he had focused upon a veritable furnace of lust. Shedward, the local butcher, was entertaining girls from the orphanage.
Lovechild beholds the scenario through Lucifer's anamorphic distortion. She can discern a ring of naked girls, none more than twelve or thirteen years of age, lying prone on the floor; seemingly enjoined in mutual cunnilingus. The butcher is squatting in the centre, clad only in his bloody apron, whooping and thrashing his own haunch with a riding-crop as he gleefully shits into a pail of giblets. Lucifer pans across the room. There, on an ebony rocking-horse, sits the queen of this pubescent coven. She wears a roasted rack of lamb for a tiara, and is veiled in raw suet and ligatures. Her nude body has been painted all over with animal blood. A girdle of hearts rests over her hips, pallid aortas skirting her pelvis, and rib-bones dangle from her small, pierced nipples.
The next second, Shedward is up behind her in the saddle, pushing her forward over the wooden mane as he lifts his apron and starts to wipe his foreskin along her perineum. The suet mask snags on the horse's ear and slides off. Although the face beneath is caked in crimson, and the transmission of its image warped, Lovechild knows at once the identity of this teenage meat-mistress.
Her daughter.
The vision curdles, dissolves in burnt amber. Lovechild starts to turn in the grave, over and over again, shrieking, railing at the lid of her coffin, nails striping the mouldering satin. She can think of nothing save the sight of her traumatized child, and revenge upon Shedward, the defiler; abandoning all concentration on her errant eye. Unbound, Lucifer plunges into the orgiastic fray; from orifice to soaking orifice he flies, into teats and brains and testes, sucking up electricity like an orbital sponge.
Unbridled power loops into Lovechild's torn psyche, sworded and scorpionic, pricking as if the inside of her refulgent cranium is being needled by a thousand nomad hornets. Her fontanelles dilate with converse litanies and tirades, pan-pipes feeding back into a primitive night illumined by shifting occult pyres, ritual murder and the blazing effigies of reaper kings; gold and scarlet swastikas surmount the moon.
Archaic stars invoke phantoms, chaos irradiating torn-out hearts in carmine necromantic chalices, fetishes and glittering coils, ditches brimming with magma and silver faeces, haunted ruins shimmering under fiery spurting arteries of the sky; upward cataracts of dog honey in a valley of tongues that speak ecstasy.
Little Michaela was first to the window, pointing in awe towards the old graveyard. Following her wet finger, Shedward beheld what appeared to be a massive pyrotechnic display, or perhaps a fallen comet trail or conflagration of St. Elmo's fire, raging on the skyline.
Spectral sparks endlessly crisscrossing a high, oscillating rampart of cosmic sulphur, while strips of mutinous energy lanced the atmosphere; tombstones, deep-sunken, like torched she-heads beneath this rainbow-hued inferno.
The butcher, a superstitious soul, often fancied he had seen faery lanterns dancing atop that hill. Loins piled high with lean steak, beady mind's eye pressed hard to a knot-hole in some mythic childhood fence, he would lie on the chopping-block imagining orgies of lesbian flower-dwellers: tiny, whip-cracking winged dominatrices in slugskin catsuits gyrating over grave-slabs lit up by blazing petals, while eunuch elfin held aloft trophies of carious, grown-up molars; borne on a warm wind, shivers of sad, charred melody. Tears would flow from the butcher's eyes then, mingling with the cords of drool upon his ample chins, as he gently wept in the shadow of spinning, strung-up heifers shod in shiny vinyl boots.
Yet this firestorm, surely, was evidence of even greater forces; forces that Shedward was already longing to enslave. Abandoning his girls, he rushed to the street, shouting out to arouse the slumbering village. Soon, a confused mob had assembled outside church; some marvelling at the nocturnal lights, others fearful of evil magicks.
Brandishing his cleaver like a holy sceptre, Shedward assumed command, proclaiming that they were about to harness the secret power of the woods; then, counter-armed with wands of vaulting ignition, they stormed the coruscating cemetery.
Cold flames turn their breath to lilac steam, fixed like pinned starlings in a maze of chattering, radioactive crosses. Far below, the earth begins to rumble. Shedward imagines She of Tombs, jacking off the dead. Soon their cold semen will kiss the heavens, dousing the mob's brands like a blizzard of angel teeth. The earth splits open.
Lovechild has risen from the grave.
Shrouded in luminous ash, wailing like quicksilver, she levitates above Shedward. Black fireworks erupt from the pores of her smoking skin, fanned by the creeping beat of pinions greased with satanic butter. Shedward cowers down, voiding his bowels on a poppy wreath; Lovechild descends. They are face to face. Her right eye transfixes him with hate; left Lucifer is reeled in from girl heaven. He slips inside Shedward's mind, drinking in electrical impulses and pissing them back out into the void.
From Lovechild's empty eyesocket a speckled wardrum drops, followed by a goosetail and a dildo oozing hot, sooty phlegm; the manifest debris of the miserable butcher's persona. Ant-covered dials on cords tumble out, then pork-bone pariahs, a dog in a cow's orbit, eight-balls in egg-shells, clawdust, caves within kitty, figments from a chapel of flawed diamond skulls, two clockwork sailors, thunder on hooks, skin bells cut from the boiled slaves of birds, red honey in a head-cage, keyholes, hexed cobalt breasts, a dreamboat of rats, cups of puce tears beneath a tinsel tree, and a hymenopterous cupid caul with orchids; littering the boneyard like flaccid, discarded toys in a neon nursery.
Avenged, Lovechild lapsed into putrefaction. It was the end of Shedward; all his hair fell out, and he spoke only gibberish from that day on.
VI : DEVIL'S GOLD
Gillespie awoke sweating excrement, face grooved like a silver bullet from a black gun. Midnight scars had filtered through the bars from the waxworks without, sinking scarlet stumps into the sleeper, tethering all dreamtime to Nemesis. Was there no end to this faecal conundrum?
Gillespie had been splayed in a velvet hole for days, dogged by a moon rotting in its axis like a bad penny. Its every emission spelt immolation.
An anal pact is easily struck, but it
leads into labyrinths whose demon is hard to beat. As instructed, Gillespie had hoarded his stools in a cauldron for thirteen lunar cycles, moulding each collection into an infantile effigy. Doubtless these manikins were yet abroad, harvesting teeth of the sea and star spittle, the sonic fragrance of death rattles or livid paranoiac essences, talking eggs and a thousand other prizes to adorn the pit where the demon was coiled amid its primaeval gallery of skulls on spikes. And what of Gillespie? Raped in the cradle by a spectre of creeping whips, he had dwelt since adolescence beneath the soft hammer of an oneiric pathology; his reward, slowly realised, was the power to manifest the female animas that sluiced nightly through his psychic pans.
At first, he noticed only vestigial change; dilated nipples, fingernails that could rake through muscle. Soon he could alter the shape and colour of his eyes without cosmetics; he needed no blade to remove the hairs from his face – they dissolved with a wish. With each fetid baby delivered up to the demon, another shade of woman hooked into his flesh.
In dreams, Gillespie wanders sodden, hermaphrodite corridors, halls that resonate with the melancholy of outcast animal kings. He conjures forth and preens an eight mouthed ululating penis, unleashes tulpas from the folds of his scrotum, drags cold reluctant somatic formations from occult slits. Cephalopods. He caresses his breasts on a throne of bones, while eunuchs swing in the void.
Now, when he wakes, memory persists. The dawn sky is frozen, heavy purple tallow, shot through with stars smeared like rectal kisses. Now, it will always be night.
At the thirteenth eclipse, Gillespie rose in the looking glass.
Suffused in perfumes and furs, she had infested the mantle of the moon as it hung nailed to its vitreous tract. Immersed in the lakes of her own eyes, she now understood why beasts screamed by night, why her emanations tore their souls apart. Raking her distended belly, imbued with the charge to blister blood and brine, she writhed in perpetual orgasm. Her tears were incandescent; she shone. In its lair, the demon also ejaculated.
Smouldering dark ectoplasm stained the house of Gillespie. A muttering doll of diarrhoea in flux spilled from its ditch and scampered away. But the demon, like most of its kind, was greedy and treacherous.
The lunar bitch was gravid with madness, and could bear him many more offspring. This dream was cast in silver.
Henceforth Gillespie stalked in a furnace of broiling clitoral mesmerism, a brace of champing vaginas each side of her groin. More time worn than the night, she lit up brothels like a holocaust and melted the wings of reality, flayed the face of sanity and used its skin for nightmare leaking condoms. Countless men penetrated the trash inferno of her vulvas, perishing as the fangs within devoured their meat, lapped up their blood from the oval trough. Magic infants fucked each other in the hollow hides. Women too were drawn into Gillespie's web; for them, she would unfurl a phallus from her churning navel, injecting every orifice with hallucinogenic seeds, a legion of thirsting vampire bruises.
Spellbound by carnage, at first she scarcely noticed to faecal tinge to her perspiration as it wove its humid penumbra; yet soon the molten gutters were heaving with turgid waste, her cell soused in cataracts of excreta. Her holes would not heal over. She was halo'd by the stench of latrines, crucified in the dusk – a nebulous church of plague larvae – while her lover lay masturbating in its crypt.
The demon had the segmented body of a worm. No limbs, just a long penis of reptile bone tipped with carcinogenic pincers, and a head of ossified manias. By the clicking of its scums Gillespie knew it, by its recidivism and simmering debauch. It was lodged beneath her hovel. Ravenous. When would the Sandman return?
He came with chains and a cacophony of razors, a swinging pumpkin lantern beneath his feral cloak, a plot of knives tattooed on his gently rotting brain. His breath stank of semen and funerary ashes. Ah yes, he had the style of eternity, her lover; mummified wasps pierced his foreskin, graveworms sutured his veins. His black leather skin was corrupt with tumours, and his suppurating fingers bore bodkins that he plunged into the pearls that filled her eyesockets.
Living sickness wraiths her cot. Everywhere, predators.
Phantoms of desiccated meat now throng her nocturnal craw, shrouded by a tortuous avalanche of cleavers. She wakes to escape revenge. The room boils. Walls throb with an arterial pulse. Auras of blood, venereal dementia, astral rape and deformity intermingle with the thrashing vitriol of excrements that bursts from her pores, bound to sate the demon underground. A glacial splintering heralds the jealous moon, reeling across its fractured wax heavens, lashing with caustic rays.
Gillespie's anus has metamorphosed into a third vagina. The only stools that slip from its scalding lips are bloodshot, and gallows shaped. They shriek at first bite of cold air. Two more vulvas yawn in her armpits, foaming with fried chicken bones and cigarette stubs.
Thirteen nipples ooze faecal lava.
That night her brood returns to guzzle at these stinking teats, crouching like incubi over her chained torso. Each dwarf swells as it feeds, until, completely engorged, it splits into several more creatures.
Everything merges: walls, floor, bed, a single circus of pure excrement.
Gillespie is a filthy, seething mass of clashing tides; one minute void of form, the next delineated as a nest of gargoyles. Finally unsexed, it perceives itself as an ulcer shifting in the rectum of some porcine deity.
Suns and stars form a cathedral of maggots, where skeletons howl like flowers.
There is a stranger in the pigsty.
VII : SHADOW SICKNESS
Even the skinless persist.
In holy houses you can hear the sacs bursting behind walls, blackness corrupted when flinty horns draw sparks across a chalice of guts. Anemonic castrati flit between cornices, dripping psalms; nuns huddle beneath the hides of those who haunt them. Their cells are cloyed with the smell of spent incense, mingling with a viscous pine scent blown in from the nearby rookeries. Loveless, they endure the cold stasis of crayfish. Once little girls who skipped through sunlit rose arbours, they now weep in the shadow of abattoir mechanisms.
Sister Furgrave it was, who took up communion with the Jack of Hell. He appeared to her monthly, paying homage only during her menstrual period, drinking his fill before penetration. His skin had the texture of tarantulas, and stank like an ossuary. His tongue, long and ulcered with anuses, droning into her ear the obscenities which so unspeakably depraved her while his enormous, feathery penis carved away between her thighs. When he came, pints of freezing cold semen flooded through her reproductive system – a supernatural sensation far beyond mere orgasm.
Yet the Jack exacted a high price for granting such favour.
Even as he pleasured her, his goblins were abroad in the convent, claiming a victim whose skin they would peel off to add to their Master's collection.
The depredations continued into winter. Soon, the Sisters began to spy on each other. Sister Furgrave was observed in the wash house; they knew her at once as a devil's doll, the portals of Hell incarnate, by the livid intermeshing talon prints on her back; by her nipples, ragged and bitten through; and by the sight of her vulva, grotesquely enlarged like a screaming target.
In the heartless glare of the noon day sun they fell upon her, driving a thousand nails through her bones, then hanging the body from a flag pole as a talisman against evil. The flayings ceased.
Midnight. Sister Crone, disturbed by creaking and scraping in the courtyard, presses her face to the bars. Sister Furgrave's corpse is swinging like a pendulum, grating on the ramparts. Cleaved to it, a hunched, dragon winged shape, forked tail switching as its hind quarters pump in fornication. Lumps of putrefied pubis fall to the flagstones. Unseen cats begin to wail. The Jack of Satyrs has returned for his crucified concubine.
Fearing for her skin, Sister Crone hurries to the corridor.
Everything is crusted in icicles. She returns to the window. Left of a bleeding orange constellation, the Hell Knave is winging away forever with his
bride.
Henceforth, the spirits of the dead know no rest. The convent becomes a theatre of apparitions; Sister Furgrave, hollow and amorphous, omnivorous, and her glistening, raw muscled coven, stalking the dormitories in search of epidermis.
Sister Crone, struck dumb and blinded by her encounter, is elected Saviour by the Sisters. They keep her tethered by the gates, half naked, feeding her on crusts. Wayfarers, seeing the promise of copulation with a drooling, defenceless idiot, are lured to the convent.
As they avail themselves of her trussed body, they are bludgeoned to death by the nuns and then fed through skinning machines. The salted hides are hung up to cure in the crypt. With each new offering, one more ghost is laid.
Finally, only the spectre of Sister Furgrave remains unappeased. The skeletons and guts of dead travellers afford her little satisfaction. She may not rest until she has retrieved her own, nail ridden bones from Hell.
Hazel, the Exorcist, is summoned. He sets up his apparatus in the forbidden chamber where Sister Furgrave once gave herself to iniquity. Insisting that simpletons are closer to the spirits, he requires the assistance of Sister Crone in his rites. She is made nude, then tied to the poison cot. At once, Hazel sodomises her, proclaiming that a virgin may not act as a fit host for malevolence, which invariably uses the tradesman's entrance. Then, without further ado, the ritual commences.
Surrounded by candles and diagrams, Hazel preaches from arcane bibles, peers into prisms, writhes around in drifts of pulverised offal. At the thirteenth hour, possession: Sister Crone, she who has no voice, starts to screech a blasphemous, profane litany. The scales fall from her eyes, which emanate the atrocious sadness of the disembodied dead; her flesh bristles with corroded nails. It is Sister Furgrave who now strains like a dog on the bloody bonds.
