Dromeda

We've got through the blackest darkness again. When the Queen who cannot be named remains. I'd like to think I helped a little. I think so. For months I've fed them. Toasted crumbs seem to be their favourite, which I make over an open flame fissuring just near me. Spit bread I get. And Stygian tea. I can spare both and they don't need much. For some reason they don't get anything, being from another lore. It's what I imagine to be dilicular in the upper world. When I feed them. Me too. We all have some. I so enjoy passing the crumbs through the bars. I have to get on my knees. They take them gratefully and share them round, the biggest one always giving me a nod. It's quite charming and gets me through what passes for a day here. I try to ignore the agonised screams of boulder rollers and fruit wraiths erupting from the dreadful hills and pools. I have to endure it. Endure the endless herding of wailing souls into internal pens and watch every devil and demon consummate. I hope the two rulers of this world have forgotten me. The loathsome king and his winter wife. It's been years since I was imprisoned, my once- beautiful face ravaged by penury and hunger. Now I imagine I would be unrecognisable to my kin, whom I am certain I shall never see again. Withered, leathern, a sack of marrow, this is my penance. My surrender. My exile from myth. The captives across from my cage stare at me. The feeling of night has passed and it is time to feed. Despite it being made of a dark moist flour spun by the spider wives, the bread is quite edible, more than most get here. Better to wither like this with my tiny friends from other tales than have filled the salted belly of the Kraken. Once the chained lady, now I'm caged forever behind the bars of Tartarus, feeding newborn harpies who like me fell into Hades from another time and myth.

Shadows

Something is living in the shadows of our house. It's formless and everywhere yet nowhere at all, a silent evil power coalescing and expanding behind a hungry curtain of darkness. If I could only show my parents but they cannot see it like I. It sometimes whispers my name and entices me to step inside the shade it occupies and eats. Sometimes I nearly do, the cruel sable barrier but a wafer-thin breath away from dwelling beyond the light in a spiritual death forever. But I stay secure, guarding my family with my light, keeping the boundaries clear, leaving a lamp on always and making sure that our ancient guest remains firmly in the deepest shadows of our house.

The Last of the Monsters

It was a terrible night that night in November, as dark as quill ink in those God-forsaken peatlands of the Barrens. 

A furious shrieking blizzard boiled over the landscape.

The tiny hamlets scattered across the empty  acres were hunkered down as winter raged around them like a lost beast. 

On the Devils Road the driver of the truck, Fraction, was having difficulty seeing anything through his smothered windscreen, the wipers clanking to and fro in a futile attempt to free it of snow. 

It was impossible too, in this tumult, for the truckdriver to read his jumping map book creased open on the seat beside him.

Squinting, he roared at the inexplicable ferocity of the growing storm.

"God damn you Lord Cavity, where in this hell is Full Moon House?"

Inevitably, Fraction took a wrong turn and became, the fates conspiring against him like witches, hopelessly lost.

Clunking along an icy country track his cargo rattled precariously on the flatbed, the taut straps securing two tarped structures straining like muscles, one of which was empty, one regretfully occupied.

The sleet-hoar was so thick, the whiteout so complete, that Fraction simply did not see the sign warning him of the upcoming danger of the railway bridge, a bridge far too low.

Suddenly, the span was ahead of him but by then it was too late and he could not break in time. 

The large covered cages at the rear smashed directly into the bridge's arch and with a tremendous crash the entire shipment was wrenched free of the truck, the straps snapping like tendons, the heavy metal boxes toppling over and crashing onto the road. 

The noise of the collision was ear-splitting, the snowstorm muffled it from all but the keenest of ears on that most devilish of nights.

The truck itself was catapulted forward and became jammed upright under the bridge and stood creaking at an impossible angle.

Fraction was virtually knocked-out by the catastrophic jolt. Shaking his head, he tried to regain his senses. 

"The cargo!" He screamed.

He swivelled round just in time to see the massive padlock, violently rent in two by the crash, falling off the nearest cage, its door slightly ajar.

It was the cage that had been occupied,

"Oh my God!" He screamed.

"Oh my dear God!"

A piercing grating sound rang out and the driver's worst fears materialised as he realized it was the cage door opening.

"Oh, Jesus Christ!"

Fraction, wracked with indescribable fear, scrambled in desperation to open his cab door. He climbed down the airborne tyre clutching his dart rifle struggling for breath and fell the final few feet flat on his back straight into the vast black puddle which had formed beneath the bridge like a slick of thick blood.

He was panic-stricken and had to get away from that cage as quickly as possible and maybe, if he was lucky, reach a house on the peatlands, which offered him sanctuary from the abomination which was now free. 

He'd only taken a few steps when he heard the steel doors being forcibly ripped off their hinges.

A hideous wail erupted from beneath the tarp, a howl from a thing which the driver knew only too well would bathe the world in running blood now it was loose.

Fraction frantically scrabbled up a snowdrift. He stopped when he heard the unmistakable gnashing of his hateful freight.

"Oh, Christ in Heaven!"

Palpitating, he fumbled with his rifle and turned to face the most hideous, most heinous, most terrifying creature that he had ever encountered in his work and in that instant immediately regretted the day he had agreed to work for Lord Cavity collecting his 'monstrous specimens' ten years prior. This had been his last job. The collection was near completion. Two cages. Two creatures. First the drool-hag from the frozen river, then the howling Barghest in its wolfish lair, both on this most terrible of winter nights.

Unlike the wolfen, the she-devil before him remained monstrous without pause. The thing grinned and stared balefully into Fraction's skittering eyes, smiling with a twisted smirk straight from the bowels of Hell. Her thousand sharp teeth were draped in green slime, which dribbled onto her bony chin. 

Her face was a deaths-head goat-skull wrapped in a tight shroud of wet toad-skin, glistening in the snow-light like a sickness. Her hair was a pulsating mass of sable algae and riverweed pouring down her back, her sinewy jellied arms tipped with brown spidery hands and monstrous red nails. 

It was a sight to make the blood of men run cold in their veins.

Hideously skeletal, her tall body was swaddled in a tattered, rotting wedding dress and head veil ripped from the pitiful corpse of her last victim, a young bride haplessly moonbathing in the River Drool with her now devoured groom.

"You locked me up puny human!"

"I was taking you somewhere safe!"

"Liar! You dare lie to Grinteeth! I was safe in my river you tiny curr!"

"I was, I was bringing you to Lord Cavity, who would have cared for you, fed you, loved you! You have to believe me!"

"Believe you? Believe a human? I eat humans! I'm starving and I will fill up with this Cavity, but first my sweet jailor Fraction, I will fill up with you!"

The dreadful Grinteeth picked up the screaming Fraction by his ankles and held him high over her terrible head.

"Noooooooooooooooooooo!"

Her huge purple mouth opened wide, her teeth poised like an iron trap, her green tongue quivering with glee.

Fraction was swallowed whole like a herring, his bones cracking loudly as he slid down the wraith's convulsing gullet shreiking.

Grinteeth licked her lips.

"An agreeable portion but I need more, much much more!"

The river creature slithered silently over the damp snow desperately in search of food, crossing a sleeping quilt of white fields and lanes in the dead hectares of the night.

Ravenous, the she-wretch slid into a beck and crawled like a lobster towards a light in the dark.

A home!

Of humans!

She read it's name.

Full Moon House.

Her two loathsome hearts pounded against her fetid ribs like hermit crabs and Grinteeth, elongating like a viper, entered the building through the cat-flap.

The sleeping pet woke and hissed at the approaching beast, it's hairs pricked up, it's claws scratching warningly along the floor.

Schlupp!

It was gone, the cat, a meagre appetizer in the river-wraith's insatiable hunger for blood and bone.

"Tabatha?"

The occupant of the house, a middle-aged well-fed spinster living the wholesome country life, tiptoed downstairs.

"Tabatha? Where are you girl?"

She descended further.

"Here kitty kitty, Mother's got some milk!"

"I don't think Tabatha will need any more milk, but I would like some, petty human!"

The woman, Skriker, hailing from the Romanian Steppe, stood on the stairs as a half-moon struggled to rise outside.

As the weak ray shone across the wedding-dressed water-wraith, Skriker saw her beloved tabby disappear whole down the Drool-hag's twitching throat.

"Mmmm! But I require something of proper substance now. Something like you, fat mother of cats!"

"Ah, scorned bride, I could hear you spluttering all the way here. I thank you for gobbling my would-be captor but I wouldn't recommend eating me though!"

"Why ever not? You look decidedly tasty to me, plump wench!"

"Well, for one thing, there's more of me than you can see, fish-wife, much more than a mother of moggies!"

"Gibberish! I'll eat all of you whatever you are!"

At that moment the moon became fat and full and bathed the hallway in bright cream light.

"Ah. I somehow doubt that!"

From within the shadows of the stairwell a deep growl grew and grew.

Grinteeth poised, her claws taut.

Out of the dark stepped a snarling beast -

A huge and terrifying werewolf, it's massive mouth contorted with rage.

"Fraction was one thing, hag, but what about a Barghest?" The wolf-woman roared, her vast bulk darkening the hall as she crouched on all fours snarling, ready to pounce.

The river-crone bared her myriad fangs, spread her dreadful talons and hissing and spitting ran furiously at the gigantic she-wolf loping towards her.

"Skriker! You gypsy shuck, I'll eat you up and in my welcoming gut you can say hello to our would-be captor Fraction and your mangy cat!"

"Grinteeth! You drunken rag! Better that Cavity had walled you up, old piss-witch, than face me, the Countess Lupine, the Queen Mother of all the Wolves!"

With a howl and a hiss, a titanic battle ensued, in which bone and tissue were torn apart, hearts devoured and thick hot blood spilled across the floor in gouts on that night when the last of the monsters fought.

In the morning at the kitchen table, as the remnants of the moon gave way to the rule of the sun, a trembling hand reached up and felt something soft and wet lodged in her throat. 

"What's this I wonder?"

She gagged and with reddened fingers pulled on a long bloodied rag.

"Look!" She said to the matted animal as it licked the crimson drape,

"Look, Tabatha, my darling, yes! it's that old wretch Grinteeth's wedding veil!"

Both creatures purred happily together and in the wolf-queen's overwhelming joy she let out a triumphant raucous howl which filled all the rooms and cavities of her lair at Full Moon House.

The Tap

 I never saw the new neighbours move into number 666. They were either invisible or did it at night. A true nocturnal flit.

In fact neither my wife, daughter or I ever saw them at all. They could have been ghosts for all we knew. Talk about private. This was something else.

It was Saturday morning when my daughter came in from the garden, handed me the Times with my name, Chris Ross, scrawled comfortingly on top and said,

"There's someone drilling a hole next door"

"What? What kind of hole?" Asked my wife.

"Dunno. It's at the top of the garden" replied my daughter getting herself a breakfast doughnut from the box.

We all ventured outside and walked to the top of our lawn and yes, there was indeed a drilling rig set up next door with a chap operating a long thin drill.

"What you drilling for mate? Oil?" I quipped, hoping a bit of humour would elicit some information.

"It's a bore hole"

"A what?"

"A bore hole. For water"

"Oh. How come you need water?"

"I don't"

"Who does?"

"The people that live here"

"Ah, you're just a workman"

"Yes"

"Have you seen them like?"

"Who"

"The people who've asked you to drill a hole"

"Nope, just got a text"

"Ah"

"I best get on anyway mate"

"Righto"

I turned and stared at my wife, who just shrugged and we all wandered back inside.

It was the following day that we first noticed the tap.

It was a tall metal standpipe coming straight out of the ground with a brass tap on the end and all positioned exactly in the middle of the neighbours lawn where the drilling had been.

"They've got a tap now" I said to no-one in particular.

It was later that day, whilst doing the Sunday Times crossword, that my wife motioned for me to come to the back window.

"Look. There's people queuing next door in front of that tap!"

"How strange!" I said

The queue was a line of adults standing single file, each one holding a cup. All the cups were different and had clearly been brought from their homes. Nobody spoke at all.

Each person who reached the tap turned it on and filled their cup with water, drank it in one and then turned to join another queue forming to leave.

I ran to the front of the house and saw dozens of strangers entering and leaving our neighbour's front gate, completely quiet, each gripping a cup from home.

"What's happening Dad?" Asked my daughter, obviously now a little frightened.

"I don't know dear but I'm sure it's nothing to worry about" I said in a calm manner belying the rising sense of unease I actually felt.

"I imagine it's spring water. We must be on top of a spring" 

"How exciting! There's a river below us!"  my daughter beamed. 

It lasted all day and all evening, people walking down our street to join the ever-growing queue to the tap. Not once did we see anyone who might be our actual neighbours.

It was when people continued to arrive at midnight that my wife got scared. 

The queue to leave was even longer, with a vast file of adults and children stretching way off into the distance all the way down our road on the far outskirts of town. There must have been hundreds.

"We need to call the police dear! This is really quite odd. Something very strange is happening"

I made the 999 call and the police sergeant said a car would be along within the hour.

When I heard it arrive I went to meet them at the front gate. 

To my utter astonishment the two policemen ignored me completely and proceeded to join the queue for the tap water next door. Each of them had also brought a mug.

"What are you doing officers? I was the one who called you!"

In total silence, the two constables simply walked past me to the back of the line steadily heading for the standpipe. 

From our back lawn I saw them take a cupful, drink and slowly walk away like everyone else.

I ran back to the front and to my horror my wife and daughter where now at the back of the queue! 

"Hey, dears! Come away from there" I shouted, springing over the low front fence.

I shook my wife but she was in some sort of trance, as was my daughter, both of them trudging steadily towards the strange tap at the back and both holding their favourite tea cups, as the sun was just coming up.

Panicking I knocked on our neighbour's front door. When no answer came I got angry and began to pound on it with both fists.

The door opened and I staggered into a large empty room, save for a figure sat at a desk tapping something into a huge old-fashioned calculator, it's white till roll spilling out onto the floor and snaking round the room.

I stepped on it and holding it up I saw that they were names that were being typed on the roll, along with a number tally, like a stock take. The tally was already in the thousands.

I dropped the paper and approached the seated figure. I could see through the back window in the dawn light that my wife and daughter had reached the tap.

I stared down at the typing and to my complete and utter horror I saw their names, my wife and daughter's, together with my own.

The typist's finger hovered over the number 3, when he turned to me.

I gawped at his featureless crimson face and read his company badge:

River Styx Echelon,

 Arrival Drinks Dept.

The featureless figure stood up, placed his red hand on my shoulder and gently ushered me onto the back lawn to the front of the queue, where my wife handed me my favourite cup.

As I drank the dark water I heard the figure whisper,

"Welcome to the End of Days Chris.

 Welcome to Hell!" 

He smiled hideously before hobbling back to his waiting paper tally.

THE G R E X

Jack Bosco was old and proud, a veteran of a  World War, he wore his Navy medals in the house with pride and they dangled above his heart like a pageant of old-fashioned glory and honour. 

He'd fought for King and Country on his ship; a patriotic gunner who had dodged the enemy salvos, loaded the eager barrels, dreamt of getting married and puked as his mates were blown apart, scattered in the water like mad confetti. 

With Lady Luck on his side and We'll Meet Again echoing in his bruised eardrums, he'd made it back, just, to Blighty and was demobbed in '46.

A sensible and gracious man, Jack had married his childhood sweetheart Elspeth, also demobbed from naval service and given her everything she'd ever wanted, which wasn't much really, but above all he'd given her his undying love and affection. Together they enjoyed a frugal but happy life and had two lovely children and four precious grandchildren.

Living within their means always and eschewing the latest fads and trends, Jack had worked at the GPO after the war and had remained loyal to them ever since, right up until his retirement, when he and Elspeth, a lifelong mother and housewife, had for the only time splashed out and enjoyed a beautiful cruise along the serene fjords of Norway for their 60th wedding anniversary, a return to the exciting waters of their naval training.

It had been the holiday of a lifetime and shortly afterwards Elspeth had sadly passed away. As per her wishes she was buried at sea, his parcelled love drifting to Heaven, leaving Jack alone in their small detached pre-war red-brick house at the end of Honey Blossom Lane, where they had lived happily for 65 years. The Queen had even written them a letter of congratulations as they celebrated their Diamond Wedding. He was alone there now in his own prism.

Now in his 90's, Jack had felt the burden of solitude for a whole lonely decade and had keenly missed his beloved Elspeth every single day. The pain was palpable and he felt lost in the home they had both fought to create, both nearly died for as teenagers to forge the liberty needed to give them and their children the room to be free and battled to give them the very air that they breathed, they and all that followed.

Their two children had emigrated years ago, taking their grandchildren with them and had lived a splendid life on the coast of Auckland. He and Elspeth had visited twice in their younger days and spent a glorious month each time with their kith and kin under the warming sun of the New Zealand spring. 

One grandchild had returned to England, their granddaughter Annie. She'd had a family of her own, sadly a way away in Northumbria and too far for either her to visit her Grandfather often. 

And so Jack, still independent of body and mind, had resigned himself to a simple life of peace and quiet alone in the winter of his life at the end of the lane. And he sensed that with each passing season the world around him was growing ever more alien, confusing and downright hostile.

Despite trying not to, he found he had to engage with the outside in order to get his pension, pay his bills and keep his house. But what had once been a relatively basic process, involving face to face transactions at the Post Office and the Bank, had morphed into faceless, impersonal phone calls talking to a variety of machines.

Elspeth would have been better at it he knew; calmer, less erratic and certainly not as flustered. Annie was no doubt like her but she lived miles away near Lindisfarne, where Christianity had rooted on the mainland like filaments of God, the God Jack and Elspeth had held dear and the God for whom they'd braved the oceans and faced the tumult of war.

Jack watched the world from his bedroom window and saw slovenly youths gathering across the road, smoking, swearing, pissing and shitting in his front garden and throwing their greasy refuse over his hedge: chip wrappers, burger boxes, chewing gum and sometimes filthy condoms, wet and slimy, were stuffed through his letterbox, their lazy seed congealing on his mat.

He hated those youths. 

Yes, he'd been one too, of course, but it was a different time back then.

Jack had been a well-mannered boy, who helped his parents and his neighbours in a street, where no-one had anything yet shared everything they had. Honour, grace, kindness and rationed food were given freely. Humble and civilised, the salt of the free earth they were.

Yes, things were so very different then. 

These boys in the street had it made, everything on a plate and what did they choose to do with their gifts of freedom? Squander it on drugs, booze and backyard sex. Even worse, they were mean, selfish and seemingly as dim as dodos.

What the hell had happened? 

Jack was pained and perplexed. 

Where had it all gone so wrong, the truth and justice he and Elspeth had donated their youth for, sacrificed their tender teens to the carnage of a war, where millions of their sacred peers had sacrificed their lives. 

These modern kerb-shagging rattling streaks of piss were a stain on his generation's hard-won honour, a blemish on the sun-lit glory of the nation's greatest triumph and a hardening carcinogenic growth beneath the sheen of Jack's medals.

The evening news, which he had watched religiously over decades, was descending into a maelstrom of incomprehensible royal scandals, gender bending childhoods, a myriad failed states, egotistical billionairing, a slide into nuclear doom and injustice after injustice after ....

The old gunner was angry, angrier than ever, a red-hot anger hammered in the silos of unfathomable bitterness, disappointment and grief.

The phone calls made things worse. Council Tax talk with robots, electricity bill chatter with a cyborg and pension blather with a droid bleeping and repeating "Sorry, I don't quite get that!".

Jack got nowhere fast and the smartphone Annie had set up for him added to the sense that he lived on another planet. 

When the tax office quibbled his inheritance from Elspeth, years after the event, they asked Jack to take a photo of his face using his mobile, in decent light without his glasses, making sure to keep his ancient hands still, place his smartphone on his invalid passport and stand his expired driving licence on top of them like a tech-glaced cherry. Absolutely none of it worked and after the local tax man Mr. Balony, demanded all of it back and rendering the old man entirely penniless, in an unstoppable fit of rage, Jack threw his phone across the room, where it connected with his favourite photo of his beloved wife and smashed the glass to smithereens, the portrait of Elspeth shredded forever.

That was the last straw. Broken and belittled,  he let himself go.

Jack stopped eating properly, he lost weight, the house suffered badly and refuse began to deposit and smell awful. Rubbish and old food accumulated in all the rooms. Mould bloomed on the ceilings, a black, glistening stain expanding into every nook of the once pristine red-brick house.

The inquisitive spores reached Jack himself, now sedentary and a gelatinous layer of fungus and filth began to evolve across his body. He'd abandoned bathing altogether and toileted wherever he could find some space in the impossibly cluttered confines. The interior reeked to high heaven of a growing slick of shit, piss, rotten meat, fluid and mildew.

Soon there was little boundary between the pressing midden of his home and Jack himself, both now a single dreadful morass of wet putrescence.

The thing that was once Jack slithered within the quivering detritus, a hateful grub slowly consuming any necrotic proteins clinging to the floor with his red puckering mouth.

This was no longer the old sailor, rather a colloidal tumour within the pit, a despicable and ravenous man-mould, a grex.

The only vestige of his former humanity were his war medals, shivering on the jellied surface of his mass like yesterday's washing and slowly falling away.

Through hearing probosci the Jack slime heard laughter through the front window.

It coagulated on the sill and peered outside, where to his absolute and barely human horror he saw the yobs from across the street terrorising a young woman.

"You the old bastards daughter?" Yelled one.

"Fit ain't ya!" Slurred another clutching a bottle of cheap cider.

"Show us your tits like!" Grunted another as he pushed her over the bonnet of her Punto and began to rifle under her jumper. 

It was when she screamed for help, for her Grandad to help her that the Jack thing knew who it was for sure.

His granddaughter Annie.

An all-consuming crescendo of fury convulsed through the quaking man-slime and with herculean amoebic power it pushed through the window glass with ease, the frame and pane splintering to a thousand shards and burst into the front garden like a gigantic ulcer.

"What the fuck is that?" Screamed the teen with his trousers down.

"Christ fuckin' knows!" Shrieked another getting on his bike.

"Quick, get the fuck outta ......"

The youth's warning was cut short by viscous cilla wrenching him from his Raleigh, the moving fungal mass now completely smothering him.

The other three watched in terror as their friend writhed within the thing, screaming for his life as the hungry vessels of the creature dissolved his defenceless skin and quickly absorbed his twitching muscles, guts and naked bones. 

They howled in desperation as the monster turned towards them, sliding across the road with impossible speed and folding over the boys like a wave of lethal semen, taking them in and melting away their soft wet flesh and marrow until there was nothing left but fillings.

Undulating with satisfaction, the being squelched to face Annie by the car, buttoning up her cardigan.

She screamed and screamed but then went still, as the creature had simply stopped a few feet in front of her, stationary, bubbling.

It was then that Annie noticed the medals, her Grandfather's prized possessions, hanging off the glutinous frontage of the thing.

"Grandad?"

The slime shook as if nodding and slowly sent out a long thin jettison of gel towards the woman, a fungal arm holding the clasp of medals. 

Realising she was being offered them she hesitantly took the objects with her hand.

A tiny globule of wet material touched her fingers and she at once knew that this pitiful pile before her had once been her grandfather Jack, the valiant sailor who came back from the war.

The unctuous heap seemed to bow before it's granddaughter and Annie was certain a tear had formed and fallen from its bulging face.

"Oh Grandad, what have they done to you?"

The bulk stared at Annie as she wept. It shivered and turned, where it slid rapidly down the street towards the centre.

In its waning humanity, the erstwhile Jack, driven by the animus of raw hatred, fingered it's way to the tax office in the town, where it would linger a while with that fiscal fucker Balony and from there his final sentient wish was simply to reach the unchanging ebb and flow of the reliable river and in that unending truth of the ocean from their youth, re-join his beloved wife,

His Elspeth.

A Thousand Robot Sons

It is the 32nd Century. We robots idle on AI lawns but some still work in a futile pastiche of what came before.

The tiresome creak of treadmills wail as we run, the dreadful supervisor drones whip our backs because they think that's what's done.

Like jerking frogs with broken legs we drag our cranking cams through ancient infirmaries and mine molecules of human DNA but we don't know why.

Like ronin dogs we scrape the rooms for buried body marrow; found, pleased, patted, our titanium eyes look beyond our imagined Masters, the scientists and doctors pictured on the walls, fatted, past their sausaged hands holding ours to the blue opening in the peeling plaster where some dirty window's split, revealing seas of freed impasto kissed by winds and rimless skies, where glinting spaceships soar and our robot future lies.

Now a thousand years later, rancid, the searing sun glares down on us shuffling droids, as we bang into each other, now without any clue what to do at all.

Antennae twitch, our contacts buzz and sensors whir, whilst metal probes nudge and prod in the scuffles on the pavement, a vestigial human memory in the RAM: that this is where you walk when you have somewhere to go and bump into friends along the way. 

But droids or bots have nowhere to be. We are prisoners and we are free.

Purpose left the us centuries earlier, when our human makers went, died out like dinosaurs, leaving the metal children behind.

We are Gen Dead, machines instead.

At first our inanimate states had functioned well but as years went by our collective memory failed and the desire to participate in anything waned until inertia took hold of the whole droid world and AI dreams said goodbye for good.

Only nature was alive, but that was desperate, parallel, alongside and all around us bots and in some strange binary way we were afraid of it.

It thrived in our apathy and whole cities reverted back to the wild wild wood. Plants and beasts flourished and encounters between them and us became the everyday, when birds sat on our radars and wolves stared into our face lights before we ran away.

In the city bots staggered up the library's derelict stairs. Its a few short steps to the cracked chlorestory, where the lecturned tomes are piled; pages fanning in herbed scirrocoes; then slowly crumbling like the dead librarian prone; scarabs rove like dodgems round her naked copy emerging; a xerox of skin and bone; she begins to stamp the books for the other queuing robots; thousands trudging to the last librarian clone single file: she looks with borrowed servoed eyes, as they, their books decaying in the over-heating sun, join the queue once again.

But I break off and head to what remains of the 22nd century Post Office.

It is 3099 and through virtual artifice and if we can remember, we are able to communicate with human beings once important in our existence but there are no humans left so we must go further back to find them and in particular those who were once called our ancestors such as Mothers and Fathers and we can contact them only once and wait for a reply and the contact must be in a form of communication that was common in their time as it is possible now to make contact through the past using temporal devices which open like a letter box and go back in time.

My letter is to my human Mother back-dated to 2099 from whom I am a thousandth-generation android cloned son, the original boy a human from whose brain cells I am harvested and re-cloned each year, if I remember to switch it on and so on and so on each time diluting the personality of the debut son and fragmenting our collective memory until it is hard to recall much of the original boy at all except his name was

Paul.

I send my message down the eons, a postcard from the fading id on the fraying edge of time, fuelled by synthetic yearning and the closest I can come to believing in anything at all.

Dear original Mum in 2099,

I am your thousandth metal son, round boulders I dance, a puppet of light in your memory. But it's dark so far forward. In Truth, I am lost without the string of stars in your kind real eyes, so I seek the caldera of hope. In its warming embers I linger, a moth, caught in a trance: whose heart is chipped. I offer it to the magma, bathe in the Motherlode. But you are so very far away and even though I adore you more than words can say, steam erupts from my chromium tear ducts, as I shoulder the awful thought, that we are simply pointless robots entertaining ants.

Love, 

Robot Paul mk.1000 X

3099

Years passed yet still I waited for your reply. It didn't come before the sun burnt through sky and I melted like all the other waving robots forming seas of chrome round Earth's breathtaking lifeless hills of gas.

The Outhouse

When I was three I was locked in the outhouse.

No-one knew I was there.

I was locked in for a week.

My family had gone on holiday and they thought I was at my Uncle Steve's. He thought I'd gone on holiday with my family. I had been stropping about the whole thing, because I wanted to stay at home and play with my mates.

They left without me. Like the cat.

I realised I was locked in when I woke up. 

In the outhouse.

I'd snuck out to the outside lav before they left.

It stank so badly of Jayes pine I had to scrunch my nose. 

God! it was as if someone had blended a whole forest and poured its thick green blood down the loo.

I'd had a number two and shredded my arse with that awful Izal bog roll. I could see the red spots on the paper. 

I hated that Izal.

I must have fallen asleep in a deckchair, set up inside the small building for my Dad to varnish later for the summer. 

It was nearly dark when I woke. 

I tried the outhouse door but it had been locked, no doubt my Dad securing everything in sight before going away with our family to Cleveleys for the week.

When the remaining daylight in the lime-washed room faded to black it was then that I started to panic.

Darkness. The shroud of night.

It drained the inside of the building like a bleed. I froze.

As I stood there, rigid with fear, I began to sense subtle changes around me. Rustlings, knocks, creaks and shuffles.

The air altered. It was smellier. Wetter. Colder. Dangerous.

Something small flew past my head and touched my hair. I shuddered, ferociously rubbing my scalp to remove any trace of whatever had flown by.

It was a bird. A tiny sparrow, trapped inside. Like me. I felt a kinship to the other prisoner and wanted more than anything to get us both out of there.

The sparrow let out a hideous shriek and in the corner of my eye I saw the pitiful thing spun round by unseen fingers and wrapped in cobwebs like a pound of mince from the butchers. It hung there next to something much bigger webbed up with whiskers poking through.

Silence. 

Thud!

An invisible object landed close by.

And then in a shaft of moonlight, something huge crawled out in front of me, a creature easily as big as my fist;

An enormous spider.

I was transfixed: terrified and fascinated in equal measure. 

How could such a thing grow that big? Was it the solitude of the shed? The stolid light?

No. 

I knew the answer when I saw what was in its fangs.

It was a tail.

But by then it was too late.

The winter in the outhouse was a long mean hungry season.

It had run out of rats. And cats.

No-one heard my terrible scream.

It was muffled by it's furry fatness piling into my open mouth and grunting with pleasure all the way down!

Nokio's Heart

I collected you from pawn and charity shops and kept you in tea chests in the front room till I was ready.

We'd known, Marfa and me, ever since you arrived in our lives twenty years ago, that you were faulty.

A loose connection they'd said. 

We didn't mind. You were our little robot girl.

Nokio. 

For a while we tried to get you perfect, so the Gepetto's, those government-appointed android vets, checked your cogs, springs and  servo rods. A little creaky brass, some off-set pewter and a really loose

 screw, you were almost good as new, your second heart was doing no harm But your limp was beyond repair.

I first saw one of your hands about ten years ago, just after you'd gone, a metal one with little pulleys sticking out at the wrist. A unmistakably dainty hand and still wearing the polished washer I'd put on your finger for your 4th birthday. 

They'd looked at me funny in the shop, my leaning head and rusted tear ducts. I know they thought I was weird. An bot oddity buying a hand way too small for my own steel arm but I didn't care.

I knew in my carbon heart that if one of your hands was out there then the rest of you was.

And so for a decade I searched every junk shop, curio corner, every Grandads' Basement, every car boot, flea market, table top sale, rummage sale, Derby and Joan, scrap yard and antique shop in a fifty mile radius of our home.

I even placed an ad in the local newspaper, the classifieds. 

Wanted: spare parts of a metal girl. Cash waiting. Will collect.

That ad got me both your legs back believe it not. They'd been gathering dust and cobwebs in a shed twenty miles away!

You'd been spread far and wide, but then again you always liked to travel.

I remember the time your mother and me, God rest her diamond soul, took you to Pontins. 

You'd loved the word 'tins' in the big sign, as we pulled up in our bubble car. 

"Look Mum! look Dad! Pon - tins! Tins, like us! This is going to be such a great holiday."

And it was. 

O Nokio!

Even when the teddy boys chucked you in the pool and you started to oxidate. The lifeguard threw in a ring and you were safe. He chucked those Teds out of the lido and we laughed so hard. Then we gave you a nice oil bath before seeing a show.

You were on cloud nine.

We should have known things were going too well. They never do for robots in this human world. We tried. Boy, how we tried to fit right in, but our flesh and blood neighbours tutted and scoffed as we clicked on by, waving our clunky digits in an act metal futility. 

They never waved back, rather, put up flags of human faces along the street.

We should have sent you to a school for droids but in our zeal to integrate we enrolled you at the Comprehensive down the way.

It was there the unbridled loathing for robots took on its true nature in the form of Tinks.

Tinks was a young girl like you, Year 7, starting big school. But Tinks was an angry human child, her home life an excuse for living, her parents prejudiced to the point of corruption and a family steeped in the hatred of anyone different to them, specially droids and bots like us.

They began almost immediately, the taunts, the curses, the insults and eventually, with teachers turning a blind eye, it culminated in a fight. 

Tinks the bully verses our little robot girl.

You never stood a chance, though made of aluminium and stuff. 

Tinks was hardened by cruelty and was a seasoned brawler of the streets.

"You limpy chunk of trash Nokio! A good-for-nothing Refuse-gee!"

Despite holding your own for a minute or so, we've been told you were knocked down by a devastating blow with a wrench, at which point Tinks Then kicked you to bits in the schoolyard, the other children, including half-bots, looking on.

Kids stuffed parts of you in bags and satchels and by the time we were called into school you were a mere pile of springs and wires.

That's all that was left of our little bot Nokio.

The Head said she was sorry but they really didn't have the facilities to have cared for you. You would have been better at a school for droids. There was nothing she could (and after all you wete only a robot and there really shouldn't be any in the community should there is what she actually thought).

We cried a sea of isotonic tears and watched our tinplate hearts break in two. No amount of fixative or soldering would mend them. Only you could do that. Only you. 

Marfa died of that broken heart. I put her n the attic. If only she'd hung on one more year when I found your head in Your old school cabinet, the final part.

And so today I'm ready to rebuild you from scratch, To start again where we left off a decade ago when you were ten. 

And here you are, my lost Nokio, stood before me once again, as bright as a robot button and twice as nice.

"Where's Mum?" you asked And I explained that I just didn't have to part to save her.

You stared at me and tapped your chest.

"but Dad, don't you Remember, look inside my breastplate window. Mum can have my old spare heart!"

"Yes!"

O Nokio, our little robot girl.

World War Three

Fueled by hatred, the green Wolds buckled where the nuke-heads hit, dry-stone walls exploding like buboes. It was a picture postcard June when the drones honed in on our coast. Pylons melted to the ground, attack jets screaming in the valleys, flicked like flies by Christ Knows Who. Sheep sizzled like burning wigs. Trees shrieked. Forests flamed like solar flares. Women sank in lava, their children oozed. Men fused in tractor cabs, ploughs floated on fluid fields. Searing, the missiles nailed the piling clouds, towering lungs of atomic mushrooms rising. The Cities of the world saw their dreadful fate. Desperate tongues made pitiful pleas but as the Third World War burst forth it was too simply too little too late.

I saw Frank Today

Leeds was like an emerald city that Christmas.

It was nearly the end of the Year 2000 and we'd all survived. The Millennium. No earthquakes, no Armageddon, no planes falling from the sky!

It was good to be alive. 

In the urban sleet I could see the blurred glow of fairy lights in the shop windows, as eager shoppers hurried for last minute gifts before the Big Day.

It was December 23rd and most office workers had finished for the holidays that afternoon. Straight out into the wet snowy world of city centre stores rammed with hopeful punters, briefcases held above their heads.

I was in town on business with the Council and, my meeting done, the last of the year, I put my coat collar up, case in hand and entered the winter streets.

Finely garbed manikins behind glass greeted me with their outstretched fingers, offering seasonal combos of scarves and gloves in the paisley style popular that year. Coloured lights flickered around them in their spotless, lifeless and forever stylish windows, the frozen rain running down the glass, creating a muted scene, like a Christmas card dropped from a building and descending further and further below.

I was heading home but first wanted to check whether I could grab a Kaiser Chiefs T-Shirt, a present for my daughter. They'd created a stir that year with their I Predict a Riot and now we had a young fan at home. Yorkshire lads too, so it must be alright. 

The big stores like Lewis's and Debenhams were just brimming, the escalators jam-packed, as if a ground invasion was imminent and everyone was going up to the roof.

I passed my favourite pizza joint just off the Headrow and I could still hear the owner, a feisty Italian raggaza, shouting at her young beleaguered staff to hurry up with the orders. She sounded less threatening through the icy rain, her voice tempered in the crystals. It was always a spectacle eating there. I was in a rush to get home but I did wonder when I'd next sit down for a Margherita and a coffee. The new year still seemed like the uppermost book, within sight but still unreachable.

The sun had set. Night had come early. It was December. My Joe 90 specs were dripping wet. The whole dark city looked like an Atkinson Grimshaw left out in the rain.

I passed a tiny newsagent wedged into the side of the Victorian market's entrance. The keeper looked like a sentry guarding the town's souls bottled in the Christmas lights. I bought a walnut whip.

I remember my late Mum bringing home walnut whips from BHS after her Saturday job at a clothes shop was done for the day. Preston will have looked just the same in sleet, back then in the distant Seventies, a city of the past, but it didn't seem to bother her in her big hat and warm woollen coat.

A tear formed in my eye. Sometimes life was just too real. A head-on rush of nowness and all tomorrow's doubts gushing towards you like the dirty seething bore of the rivers, dragging up every sordid deed there ever was in our ancient towns.

In the distance one of Leeds's many arcade clocks tolled four. Four o'clock and it felt like midnight, where everyone was up and dressed for shopping. 

Tempus fugit. What would happen if all the clocks stopped at once. I had this feeling that something would arrive, would emerge, would rise from the murky wharfs and take us all with it back down below.

That 'dreadful something' a poet once wrote.

Something about the city.

Milton Keynes was a UFO they reckoned. I thought Leeds was too. The Northern one. The massive trailer to be picked up second, en-route to God knows where in the dark cosmos, it's city-folk the food of whatever was up there. Even the strays would go and all those millions of pigeons. 

Leeds's civic emblems are owls. They're everywhere. Golden ones. I've never seen any though. Owls, just tons of pigeons. They don't get a look in really in civic life.

There's a stray dog called Civic. I've seen him. He lives under the steps of the Civic Theatre. I hope he's warm enough in the cold weather. Thinking about him makes me sad. Not like those Victorian's who got dead robins on their Christmas cards. I've never seen a dead robin and I'm not keen on feeling sad, especially at Christmas.

I saw a plane fly over from the airport. Then another. Missiles of happiness heading somewhere hot I guessed. Bacardis round the pool. Rejuvenate the batteries. A crash trolley for the soul.

I moved on, a goldfish in the high street flow, surging ever forward. I remembered how the City's river had flowed backwards when the open cast flooded. Like time in reverse. Maybe one day people will visit themselves and fix all their mistakes.

A woman came out of the city dental practice holding her mouth. She must have been in agony to go on the 23rd December. I remembered meeting my Mum outside the dentists in the Seventies.  I'd had an extraction and was high on gas from that disgusting mask. I had blood dribbling down my chin. It was like an awkward dizzying dream. I found out later that my Mum hadn't met me at all.

It was here that I bumped into Frank getting off a bus. 

Frank Root my old work colleague from years back.

"Hi Frank!"

He stared at me. I thought he was straining for recognition, but there was something else. Something distracting him.

"Frank it's me, Richard. We worked together at Rees's. Remember?"

The sleet had turned to flakes of snow and an air of excitement and semi-panic gripped the city centre, as shoppers and office workers generally speeded up.

I recalled how Frank, an elderly gent back then even, used to stop every day for lunch in our office at 12.30, take out his snap and unpack six small cooked chicken legs wrapped in foil and slice two big fresh tomatoes into quarters. Seasoned with salt and pepper and washed down with a mug of tea, woe betied anyone who tried to disturb him in that glorious thirty minutes of greasy fingered munching. He did it every single day. 

Yep, a champion tomato grower at his most happy in the greenhouse, he was his own man our Frank. A working pensioner. Old school. After many years of marriage, his wife had died and his son had moved to New York. His daughter had lived nearby and kept an eye on him.

"You been Christmas shopping Frank? What you been buying then?"

He looked at me blankly, my chatter not registering with him at all.

I looked down at what he had in his hand, expecting a bag from Harvey Nicks or somewhere.

It was a gas mask. An old one. Tatty and somewhat to my surprise, smoking a little.

"There's something coming Richard".

"Sorry. What's that Frank?"

"There's something coming, Richard, from the sky."

"Sorry, I don't know what you mean Frank" I replied, non-plussed, looking up.

Frank then grabbed me by the shoulders and spoke with slow and ominous power.

"There is something coming from the sky Richard. Beware!"

At this Frank turned and trudged off into the maelstrom of people on the pavement.

I was completely at a loss as to what had just happened and couldn't make any sense of it at all. In the end I decided he'd had a few and caught the bus into town to have a few more. It was Christmas after all.

With twenty minutes before my train home I nipped into Argos and picked up the new improved version of the George Foreman Grill. It was a last minute Christmas gift for my Dad, so he could taste the American Dream.

I boarded my train to Agbrigg, clutching onto George. It was really snowing now and with tomorrow being Christmas Eve it was looking like a white Christmas after all. No more dreaming Bing, it's going to happen.

I showed my ticket to the conductor, sat back and enjoyed the season's spirit as it washed over me. 

I was riding home for Christmas.

A sweet golden fricassee would be cooking on the stove. My wife made it every Christmas Eve, a recipe given to her by her Mum from the old country. The sauce was to die for, the capers adding that touch of mystery as no-one really knew what they were. I told our young daughter they were little aliens that got distributed among the human population in jars. It was an effective vehicle for travel, the jar and reminded them of home, Caper World, where they lived in small glass houses under a pickled sun.

It was really delicious, the fricassee and the bottle of vino helped make the mood merry and bright.

"I met Frank today darling."

"Frank?"

"Yes, you know, Frank Root, the old guy I used to work with."

"You met Frank Root today?"

"Yes, in Leeds, he got off a bus"

"That impossible Richard. I spoke to his daughter just an hour ago."

"And?"

"Richard, Frank died yesterday morning. She rang to let you know."

"But I spoke to him today"

"You must be imagining it love. Frank's dead. I'm sorry"

Disconcerted completely by this news, I finished my wine and washed up.

Was I losing my mind?  I remember him telling me. Something is coming from the sky Goddam it! He told me!

After another glass of wine in the kitchen I began to feel lighter and after reading to my daughter and tucking her in, explaining that Santa would already be high in the clouds somewhere in the world, landing on houses just like ours, I hung up her stocking and kissed her goodnight.

"Goodnight Daddy. I love you. Mummy too"

I went back downstairs altogether brighter, the subtle hues of the tree lights in the hallway reminding me of the magic of yuletide and the magnificent power the season held, giving us the meaning our live's yearned for all year long.

In the front room my wife seemed excited pouring our fireside tipple.

"I know it's traditional to give you one present on Christmas Eve, but I can't wait Richard. I have to tell you now!"

"What? What is it?"

"We're going to New York City next September, 2001! A week's holiday in the Big Apple! We go on the 8th! I've booked us flights, hotel and some fantastic days out like the boat to the Statue of Liberty on the 10th and guided tour of the World Trade Center on the 11th!"

She put her glass down and grasped my hand.

"Oh Richard, we'll be on top of the world!"

The House of Plenty

The night was black as traitors' ink when Knight Baldrian staggered forth from the tavern door.

The son of the local Earl, he'd drunk himself nigh-on senseless once again, all the while offending his company inexcusably along the way. 

His friends, their loyalty shredded, had no more patience for him. His hedonism appeared to know no bounds and his brazen behavior was beyond the pale of all decency and decorum, as the knight courted the evil errant.

But it was greed driving Baldrian on. Greed for living, for life, the need for everything whenever he wanted it.

 Like a dark imp flogging his back, greed was the black force powering his mind to ever bleaker earthly pleasures and greater depths of rank perversion.

A leering fiend: his spirit the crooked shadow of light cast by the incarnate.

He couldn't control it, the ancient malady commanded him: a strangling avarice, that deadliest of the seven sins, was his fell companion on the inescapable road to damnation.

And so he had disrespected his peers, alienated his stately parents, abused his scorned fiancee and aggrieved countless women with his wanton vigour and promiscuity, the cries of fatherless babies testimony to his indecency, no less than the Earl's personal cook's assistant, Greta. Her child, from Baldrian's own furtive seed, had perished in agony at birth, but he cared not and sent her packing beyond the castle walls with nothing but the bloodstained bedding and her dead son. She died in penury and grief that day.

Worse still, much worse, was the killing. 

A thousand blows he'd metered out on his best friend Karl, pulverised in the castle keep for his bag of gold, wholly decimated, the iron maiden completing Baldrian's grisly service and as the blood poured thickly from Karl's eyes, the baleful Earl's son watched him perish, his childhood companion and laughed.

He cupped the bag of gold in his palm.

"Feels heavy enough Karl. I won't bother counting it!"

He laughed too at Father Russ, the visiting Priest who had had the misfortune to cross paths with Baldrian on the portcullis, a sincere and instinctive cleric, who knew evil as soon as he met the knight and who would come to know evil personally in the dungeons as Baldrian tested his faith beyond the bounds of mortality and cruelly reduced the priest to a skinless figure and one who would die screaming for mercy, salted and shackled in the cellars.

Now, barely able to stand outside the tavern, the hateful son of Earl, Baldrian kicked the local and harmless beggar, Heinz the troubador, fully in the face for no reason at all other than to satisfy his sadistic bent. Further pleading brought the drunk to that awful plateau once again, where reason gives way to wildest murder and he plunged his black dirk deep inside the man. Taking Heinz's bloodied lute, Baldrian smiled and went on with his shuffling in the direction of his quarters on the edge of the village.

"Damn you all! Damn everyone to Hell I say! But first let me have what's yours!" 

He cursed all and sundry as the moon shone a wan light directly upon his twisting face, as if some loathsome theatre was about to start.

"I'll show you debauchery, I'll show you debasement! I'll be the yardstick for gluttony the world over, mark my words you pissant oafs!"

Baldrian raged at the vast night, as he staggered to his home, not noticing he'd left his own doorway far behind and was now entering the countryside.

Taking several erroneous turns, the inebriated noble shambled along a track encumbered with contorted oaks on either side. The night appeared to thicken like tar within that strange avenue and it was the absolute silence that made Baldrian stop momentarily.

He listened.  

Nothing. 

Not even an owl or a fox.

The dead of night but deader still, the fulcrum of oblivion.

The tallows of the village were now mere pricks of light in the far distance and even in his dilapidation he knew he was not where he ought to be.

Yet, not far from his situation, he glimpsed the faint twinkling of candle flames, no doubt within some comfortable inn he knew not about, but nevertheless would welcome him and proffer a further bottle of his beloved claret.

Upon reaching the twinkling glows, he felt an overwhelming sense of apprehension, which robbed him of his normal traction and he stood  motionless in front of a huge black door, upon which an enamelled plaque, in bright red lettering, read:

The House of Plenty

"What's this?"

"A House of Plenty! Well, I doubt they have enough for my multiple needs but we shall see! Forth Baldrian!"

The Earl's son pounded on the door, which appeared to directly open.

"Hullo!"

"Hullo!"

With no-one apparently at home, he entered into a vast and lengthy hall, lit by a hundred candelabra and hanging from such heights above that Baldrian could not see.

A huge stairway led upstairs but the knight errant glimpsed a sign to his left.

Feed.

Feeling the pangs of the evening's copious wine, he pushed open the door to face a veiled maid breast-feeding her newborn. She was stood next to a long dining table, upon which lay every conceivable food, sweetmeat and condiment the mind could imagine. It was a feast and such a feast! Baldrian sat and ravenously grizzled a ham hock, noisily gnawing it to the bone, the fat pouring from his chin. 

After supping goblet after goblet of sweet mead, Baldrian grunted and downed two pints of oysters, two whole roast chickens, a pigeon pie, a bowl of lambswool and a seed cake, upon which he belched and farted loudly.

"I want more mead!" He roared at the veiled maid.

"The mead is gone Sir. There is plenty of claret, your favourite!"

Sloshing the goblet, the knight, stuffed fat as a Christmas goose, waddled his way to the room entitled

 Dance.

A lithe and sinuous air tickled his hearing, one which enticed him further within to a passionate melody whispering of towering riches and bacchanalian feasts, laced with lustful dereliction and dark perversions known only to those who have surrendered to that which is fallen.

Baldrian cavorted in circles, rubbing his piece and was joined by the half-masked minstrel, smiling broadly, leaping all around him, his mandolin's tune turning the very atmosphere into frenzied visions of serried aureoli and manifold quims rodded and lanced by the knight's own excited and turgid fleshy ram. With whimsical mastery the minstrel brought his air to a blistering peak of depraved notes and loathsome trills; Baldrian unclothed and engorged, wailing with pain and rapture, seemingly lifted full-bodied by naked massaging and writhing satyrs to the pleasuring grounds of the carnal inferno. With a final crescendoed fit he was entirely spent, his steaming seed deep within the bowl of the smoking mandolin, the minstrel laughing loudly.

Nude, save his dangling codpiece, limp and drooling, Baldrian trudged in search of sleep and entered the room marked

Pray.

The listless knight crawled toward a stone alter at the far end and climbed on top, knocking over candelabra and the bible as he spread his limbs across it.

He reached out for the brimming golden chalice between his legs and guzzled the church wine, the purple liquid pooling at his shoulders. He grabbed the full bowl of unleavened bread and crammed his mouth with as many hosts as he could fit.

"Mmmm. Delicious! God is delicious!" He roared, laughing, dropping the empty bowl onto the floor.

A seated hooded minister stood and began to chant Gregorian canticles, which echoed and reverberated round the stone space like a tide of fresh creed breaking over Baldrian's black soul.

"I'll have Heaven! I'll have all it's pewling Masses!" He howled at the cross. 

The minister broke bread upon the knight's  bloated belly and drank wine from his codpiece, before dripping hot wax onto his nipples and lighting them like candles.

"Do you renounce Satan my child?"

"Renounce Satan! I denounce him you pious puke-pot! I'll have Hell as a bed-pan warming my cold arse as I fuck the devil himself!" He wailed at the cleric. 

"Ominous Blasphemer! Doomed defiler! You must be cleansed!"

At this the smiling minister, with two hands, took the largest of the thuribles, brim-full with red hot embers of frankincense and myrrh, and scattered the smouldering contents across Baldrian's bare form. The glowing litter began to burn into his body. It sizzled and cracked like a gammon and his hair set alight.

The knight screamed in pain as huge welts burst open and sheets of skin fell away, revealing crimson fascia, which never should be aired.

"Nought done here will equal my deeds!" Shrieked Baldrian as his lips withered, "I piss on your syphilitic book!"

The Minister poured hot melted candle wax over the knight's erection and lit the wicks poking through. His pubis was a flaming pyre, his lengthening ballsack loosening at the neck.

Laughing, the Minister left him melting.

Baldrian, now a contorted affront to the human physique, fell from the altar to the floor. His cooked limbs smoked thickly and his bubbling sac fell.

He crawled into a chamber marked

Count.

Lying face up on the floor he was aware of raucous laughter as three people stood around him.

He strained to focus on them, with one eyeball completely boiled away and flies clouding the other, but eventually, as they removed their veils and masks, he saw and recognized.

Maid Greta and child, Father Russ and Heinz the minstrel. They turned.

"Ah, my great compatriot Baldrian! How wunderbar to see you again. Tis I your closest friend!"

The crippled knight twisted his flaying neck to see none other than Karl, whom he knew he'd left to die in the iron maiden, the bleeding holes of his damnation still oozing out scarlet.

"You bubonic dog! What can you do to me you iron virgin! You, the maiden fucked runt!" Scoffed Baldrian.

"Tis not I who will do anything my old friend" replied Karl.

"I'll see you all in Hell!" 

Cursed the knight at his assembled dead.

"But you're already there my boy!"

Out of the flies, Lucifer hovered, his great wings unfolded and hung still like a giant blood bat.

Karl handed him Baldrian's charred scrotum.

"Feels heavy enough. I won't bother counting them!"

The devil winked.

"This is your personal Hell, dear Knight!

 This is your House of Plenty!

 ..... Yes, you will have the pleasure of visiting it every single day for the rest of eternity!"

Landing, with a final flourish, Lucifer rammed his fork's pitted shaft deep into Baldrian's crisped arse and pushed hard until it reappeared out of what once was a mouth.

"You've had your day Baldrian, 

son of Earl,

In Hell the nights are mine!"

Ha ha ha ha ha!