A dirt lot was sectioned off from the city proper by yards and yards of mesh fencing. Huge pvc pipes were stacked atop each other in pyramid arrangements, and abandoned construction vehicles framed the towering, ruddy red scaffolds of steel beams like sentries. A hibernating bulldozer slept at the edge of a deep pit, a huge mound of dirt standing beside it. Elsewhere were cement mixers, forklifts, a steamroller, and innumerable cranes. At the locked gate of the construction site, a scraggly proclamation was carved into a splintered wood sign.
"Craig's Construction Site - We Build Shit."
Within, the skeleton crew of blue collar drifters snuggled deeper into their wrinkly sleeping bags, hugging themselves for warmth amidst the howling wind. Empty beer cans littered the lot, and the last embers of a dying fire in one of those improvised hobo bins were fading.
One of the workers opened a crusty eye. "Phil? That you, Phil?"
His eyes fell on a distant figure, standing atop a pile of lumber boards. Just staring at him. Watching him. The roused labourer slowly began to wonder if his coworker hadn't actually just gotten up to take a leak. It was too far off and too dark to make out any details. He heard the soft mingling of bells. He blinked and rubbed out his bleary eyes.
The figure was gone.
Must have still been half asleep. he figured. All the same, he realized he had to take a leak. Grumbling, he liberated himself from his crusty, snotty old bedroll and stretched, ambling some thirty yards distant to the bright blue outhouse. Christ, why did he have to make his nest so far from the shitter? It was freezing out, and there was something disquieting in the air. When at last he reached the plastic door, he found it occupied.
"I knew it. Phil, quit probing yourself and get out of there, I got's to go!"
Something dark and syrupy was oozing out of the crack beneath the door.
"What the?"
He flipped on a flashlight and illuminated a spreading pool of blood.
"Oh Jesus." he cringed, and moved alongside the back of the outhouse, finding its entire backside gouged and ripped open. The undignified bathroom's entire back wall was opened, and Phil's savaged corpse was plugged up to the waist in the reeking toilet hole, headfirst.
The worker no longer needed the restroom. Hot piss soaked the front of his pants, and pooled around his ankles. His mouth opened and closed noiselessly, working like a suffocating fish.
Something snagged him by the shirt from behind, and yanked him straight up and away with incredible force. He yelped as his flashlight clattered to the ground and the light busted, shorting out. Wind whipped at his body as he was thrown back-first against a beam of the construction tower, knocking him breathless. A panicked hand tried to reach for the rungs of the ladder, and his arm was yanked through an opening of a crossbar and cracked against it at a right angle. He screamed, felt something wrench him by the hair, and had the side of his face slammed against the steel. Pressing his bruised face against the beam, the unseen attacker dragged him straight up with incredible speed, sanding the side of his face against the beam. He was tossed up onto the upper levels amidst the iron catwalks, like a seal being tossed by an orca. Whatever had thrashed him followed him up here, cloaked by darkness and inhuman speed. He was picked up onto his feet, spun around, and slammed by the back of his head into another steel surface several times in quick succession - tossed, rolled, shaken like a rag doll, and swabbed across the catwalks. Starting to choke on his own blood, he feebly threw out his arms to defend himself. Long gashes appeared down their palms. He howled and recoiled, cradling his defensive wounds, and was thrown on his back. The attacker straddled him, and then his work shirt flew open and four long gashes opened themselves up down the man's torso. He screamed, gurgling as his body convulsed. He was yanked up again, throttled more, whiplashing his head and neck, then unceremoniously dropped over the edge of a rail. He pinballed off of the beams on his way down, turning up and over, and landed with the small of his back on a lower beam. His tailbone shattered, and he flipped over - an adrenaline-heightened reflex clasped his fingers around the edge of the beam. His broken arm dangled grotesquely at his side, fingers twitching. He looked up at the face of his attacker, whose lunatic smile was a crescent moon.
The man's fingers lost traction on the iron, slicked with his own blood. With a final yelp, he fell from the scaffolding. He was still over a hundred feet up.
The bashed and slashed workman lay in a broken heap at the base of the scaffolding, eyes clouding over, his lungs punctured by his own splintered ribs. The predator dropped down from aloft, landing in a cat crouch upon the man's splayed out thighs. He grimaced as the bones crunched. Then, the beast plunged its talons into the man's belly and ripped him open, chewing on his intestines before his heart even stopped beating.
All of this took place in under two minutes.
-
A two story suburban house, painted a picket fence white, stood in the night, its parlor lit tastefully and its matriarch working a grand piano. She was playing something fussy and sterile-sounding, the somber notes drifting upstairs. Her teenage daughter stared into her vanity mirror, eyes tired and troubled. How was she going to break the news?
Her eyes widened, suddenly sharp and alert as she saw a plaster face framed by conical antenna grinning in at her from outside the window. But how? There weren't any trellises, or any kind of direct access there, and the slope of the back lawn meant that the prowler had to have made an impossible jump! No, more importantly, she had to run.
The form crashed through her window, slammed her face through the mirror so that it shattered into a secondary hail of glass, and then the beast tossed her onto her canopy bed. It pounced, ripping and slashing at her. It bit off her breasts. It stabbed her, up to its wrist, up her vagina. When it was done, it collapsed the canopy of her bed atop the barely-living mangled form like a funeral shroud, then gripped the bed at either end and folded it instantly, like a sandwich. The girl's spine broke.
-
A boy navigating a dirt trail outside the woods on his bike skidded over something and crashed into the shrubs. He hissed, having skinned his knees, then stumbled over to the wreck of his bike and got a closer look.
"Oh shit!" he paled.
He had run over the body of an old man laying face down in the dirt. The geezer coughed suddenly, startling the boy with the revelation that he wasn't dead. His bearded face was matted with blood, and an arm was missing at the right shoulder socket, spilling what seemed in the dark to be buckets of blood.
"Hang on mister, I'll call for help!" the boy tried to steady his breathing, patting the wounded man's back gently.
The old man wheezed something to him.
"Huh?" the boy leaned in closer.
"-you!" he heard issue from the dying man's pallid lips.
This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.
The boy heard something tap down behind him like a cat, and he instantly wet himself. Turning around, what he saw severed his sanity as cleanly and surgically as claws severed flesh.
-
Freyja's ears perked up, her hackles raised, and she bore fangs.
"Frey?" Richie asked, waving his hand in front of her face. "What's wrong?"
"We are FUCKED!" - Freyja passed out.
The group looked around at each other.
"Movie wasn't that bad." Holly scratched her head.
-
The night was filled then by an agonizing cry, as a blood-soaked Luchesi fled into the woods, heart beating irregularly at a maniacal tempo, every skipped or doubled beat sending shots of pressurized pain through his heaving chest. The urge to gag was almost as overwhelming as the taste of iron, but the best Luchesi could muster was a ragged dryheave, his stomach refusing to give up its warm, human contents. It was an awful noise, strained and haggard, like a late-stage tuberculosis cough, and Luchesi had to fight to suck in a breath between every wave of nausea, his lungs sounding congested and sticky. His form was naked, and little bits of foreign flesh from his felled prey clung to him only via the adhesion of the blood on his skin. Raising a shaking hand to his face, he wiped away the dripping remnants of his victims from his chin and felt a sharp pain as something stuck him in the cheek. He glanced down at his red-stained hand, seeing his fingernails were receding at the bed, like those of a corpse, and were long and jagged, a sickly fungus-yellow beneath their bloody veneer. "I'm...sick…so very sick." he muttered, sitting against a tree and pulling his legs in close as he trembled in the cold. He ran his dirty hands through his hair, clearing it out of his face, and they came away covered in clumps of shed blond hair.
Crocus stood before Luchesi, seeming to tower over him like some anonymous emperor carved of stygian petrified wood.
"What did you expect, child? An invigorating surge of power exalting you into a realm of eternal, bloodlusted ecstasy? Did you think spilling your vengeance on the world would be a fun, painless little jaunt?"
Luchesi clutched at his stomach, feeling like rabid weasels were trying to tear him apart from the inside out. Was the black rain infused into every cell of his being reacting to its master's presence?
"Poor, blind fool. Even your dear mother wouldn't recognize this empty thing you've become."
Luchesi's eyes spoke where words failed him - spoke of lies and betrayal.
"Grooming you is no longer necessary. I have claim to what rotten shred of a soul you have left. Willingly debasing yourself, becoming a corruption of the human sense of purpose, to spread viral misery and drag others into Hell with you - that is what it means to open your heart to Evil. It isn't fun, and it isn't to be triffled with. You'll have to redefine pleasure from here on."
Luchesi writhed on the ground, grotesque tumurous swells of flesh and bone bulging out the back of his shoulders.
"However, I have kept my word to you." Crocus gestured to a freestanding oak door, cracked partially open to reveal the jester's old Backyards haunt within.
"Go, find solace. You'll need your strength for my final task of you."
At last, Luchesi managed to choke out words despite the internal eruptions of his twisted body.
"What... is...?"
Crocus clutched a bony fist closed with a stately air of authority.
"I do tire of repeating myself - your job - is to do as you will, Luchesi."
-
The Fallen Jester crawled down a stone staircase slicked with dew, under a strange crimson sky of unknown constellations and distant planets. A giant rocky planet, red like a terrestrial Jupiter but ringed like Saturn, echoed the lonely, eerie sounds of infinite space. Far beyond the rim of the Milky Way, no bigger than a frisbee, another planet unraveled like a ball of yarn amidst bleeding stars. Freezing plutonion plumes of the underworld exploded from the cracks of the dying world, before it and its celestial neighborhood fell into the Void, chittering with innumerable shades. One by one, the stars were going out, and elder things snaked about the open expanse as the Dark Lord's conquest played out in an eternal looping record.
Then, Luchesi's view of the dying universe was cut off by maple leaves overhead, as his twisted, gangrenous feet slipped on the wet stone, and he tumbled into an enclave formed by the exposed roots of a great, massive tree of twisted screaming faces. Within, the earthen walls breathed and pulsed like some foul genus loci whose churning stomach acids and rank gasses mirrored Luchesi's own cold, insatiable hunger.
This was not what he remembered, nor what he wanted to remember. Was this yard even now reflecting his psyche, a psyche that had been mutilated by his botched demonic evolution within the sea of black rain? Perhaps this was the feverish nightmare of the remnants of the worthless hobo he had been fused with? Was that man still screaming silently inside Luchesi, their visions mixing and mutually poisoning each other?
A fluttering drape hung at a threshold below an earthen dome ceiling with offshoot roots hanging freely. Drawn by whispers, Luchesi passed through the drape and found himself once more in his garden. The stained glass murals of his territory's greenhouse trappings were blank, empty slate gray, and a sickly, slimy green color, like decomposing lichens, seemed to permeate every ink dot of the mental painting in motion. Yet, even through the corruption of his personal sanctuary, Luchesi saw that it still offered what he needed - now more than ever - victims.
The dozens of moaning, bleeding half-corpses he had strung up in ivy and coffin lining still hung there like gothic fruit awaiting harvest. How long had it been since they had been taken? Even the newest arrivals must have gone at least a week without food and water by now. But it didn't matter. They couldn't die, not without permission. Perhaps now they could breathe rasping sighs of relief that their suffering was nearly at an end. The little games Luchesi liked to play before his gradual transition into this cursed wretch held no naughty little delights for him anymore. He had no further interest in sealing ravaged victims in airtight honeycomb stacks of coffins and leaving them to go insane from claustrophobia, toying with their sense of time, accelerating and regarding the passage of hours, days, and years. He no longer cared about presenting false hope to scurrying maze rats in the forms of doors back to the real world, or false awakening into their warm and cozy beds as if from a nightmare, before yanking their hope away. He saw no novelty in forcing them through rigged obstacle courses, or hurling them into eternal recursive falls through bottomless darkness. Even the sweet honeysuckle of rape no longer held magnetic sway over his pelvis.
Now he was no longer a child filled with glee, putting his hand in the forbidden cookie jar. Now, he was a helpless glutton compelled to scarf his cookies down by the handful to try and fill an emptiness that would never again enjoy the fulfillment of that first taste.
There was no joy. Only hunger.
And so, he clutched some guy - he think he snagged him from the graveyard shift at a gas station, he couldn't be quite sure; everything before his endless drowning in the sea of black rain seemed impossibly distant - in his talons, and began to unhinge his jaws. The man's eyes opened wide out of his traumatized catatonia, and his lips began to tremble.
"N-no, c-come on, man!" he tried to shrink back from the pulpy, hypothermic blue of the monster's cavernous gullet and esophagus, lined with puckering, teeth-rimmed suction cups like the tentacles of a humboldt squid. Luchesi's haunted eyes rolled back into his head, and he gave a silent prayer - to what exactly, and who he expected would actually answer it, he had no clue - that this meal would give him a few minutes of warmth. Or at least, prevent him from getting any colder.
Down the hatch.
…
When he had swallowed his fill, perhaps a seventh of his human larder remained. He couldn't fit anymore bodies in his grotesquely bloated stomach, and the energy it took to digest them seemed to be leeching even more heat out of his body. Then, an idea struck him.
He looked over the remaining victims, hanging in their death row cocoons.
"Kum ba yah." Luchesi groaned.
Flames licked the feet of his dangling guests, caught the silken funeral pall, and raced up to their heads, engulfing their bodies. The garden was filled with the screams of immolated bodies, screaming in the extremities of pain knowable by human nerves, and the comforting, homey scent of cooking flesh. Luchesi sat in the epicenter of the hanging campfires and drew his knees to his chest again. For a while, his shivering stopped.
Warm. he thought, smiling recently. As the animalistic screams became a soothing lullaby, his stomach at once began to contract and digest. The screaming faces pushing up against the spongy flesh of Luchesi's stomach from within began to recede, as their flesh, blood, and spirits were subsumed into the newborn demon.
"It's beautiful." Crocus mused to himself, an unseen force amidst the garden. "Like a candlelight vigil."