Shaz's Gothic

It was Halloween. The darkness sat on the town like a burnt dress.

Cass revved his bike and spun. Smoke plumed from its burning tyres. He was in a hurry to pick up his girl and give her real a trick or treat surprise.

"Get on Shaz!"

"Where we going Cass?"

"Its a surprise!"

They rode out beyond the town along lonely unlit roads. Panthers in the night searching for secrets. The queuing foothills arrived and Cass let rip up the steep incline to Reekin Fell where the old graveyard lay.

"What we doing here Cass?"

"Its Halloween babe. What could be cooler than a graveyard on Halloween!"

They dismounted and left the bike under a huge Yew. The gate screeched like a midwife and they walked up the curling path between the graves. It was pitch black save for the glint in Cass's eyes as he thought of Shaz in his arms.

The headstones stood at odd angles like rotten teeth. Worn angels stretched dark wings out over the bigger plots. Watching. Waiting. Like a family gathering eager to start.

Cass chose the biggest, darkest most weathered angel.  He felt drawn towards it. Oddly its face had the look of his mother he mused. He touched her face and lay down on the grassy grave beneath. 

"C'mon Shaz. Its nice and soft on here. We can get real comfy and watch the stars at midnight. It's Halloween after all. It'll be fun"

"You're sick you are Cass. You just want to have it off on a grave don't you! "

"What, me? I just want us to get warm and comfy and look up at the sky. I might kiss you. Yeah. Sure! Oh, and this is for you!"

Shaz opened the black box and pulled out a bottle.

"Gothic! I've dreamt about this perfume all week! Thanks babe. You're such a sweety!"

She sprayed the scent from head to toe and winked at her man.

Cass gave Shaz a big smile and he held out his hand. She took it and lay next to him on the grass.

"You're welcome".

They peered up at the endless depths above, beyond the ink of space and they kissed.

Shaz's Gothic infused the night. Cass had felt compelled to get it for Halloween. It wafted round the grave like a ghost and they embraced under the luminous crescent moon. It looked like a thumb clasping the darkness and Cass and Shaz both stared at its ancient glow.

Shaz's scent drifted into the grave itself and descended into its depths. It eased its way through the rents and rifts of death's past and reached a shrivelled dessicated face staring into the earth.

It stirred.

Twitching its dead nose, this mummied entity from eons past took in the aroma. A curious and startling sensation from long ago. A pheromone from a time steeped in smoke and flesh. A time when the entity had been a fertile witch among weak malleable men. A time for procreating with them, for raising pups, for which she was burned on the hill.

The creature had then been buried, barely alive and thrown upside down in a makeshift shaft hardly wide enough for a human. Over the two centuries of ice and worm she had forgotten which way was up and had dug deeper into the earth, sealing her fate further until she stopped altogether and hung motionless like a bat drying up in the infinite murk, dreaming of her witch babies and their own.

But now. This scent! Oh what a smell. Of potions and pestled spices. Of beds and familiars. Foetal and so enticing. Like lust and domination. Invigorating and coming from above. Or was it below. The Witch thing concentrated with all her dry brains and followed the perfume's direction. It was at her feet. She was upside down! The dullards!  But no matter. She need not her previous form! 

I can unfold and dislocate like a sack of bones she whispered.

She turned and crawls. A maggot in the filth. Rising in the dark she ascends slowly, her rancid nails coming away with an audible tear. Gradually the scent gets stronger, mixed with another that she knows full well, her children. Leather nostrils flare to savour its blended promise, the promise of release from her soiled cell, the chance to breathe the stench of humanity once more and at long last be the matriarch of her brood.

Light appears from the surface. The two lovers lie in each others arms unaware of the creeping fiend climbing towards them. They cuddle and caress in the Halloween moonlight trembling with the pleasures yet to come, the hot coupling on the grassy grave.

Cass stands and walks away to pee behind the Yew. He wouldn't desecrate a grave direct. Who knows what might happen! He shivered.

Shaz waited for her man, laughed and turned her head to look where he was. As she did she found herself staring straight into a hideously squalid face sticking up out of the ground. It smiled a toothless grin and Shaz screamed like she had never screamed before.

Cass jumped, his blood ran cold. What the hell? 

"Shaz. Shaz! What's happened? " he yelled, zipping up as he ran, stumbling over urns and vases. 

Shaz kept on screaming, her mind failing as she witnessed an entire monstrous thing emerge completely from the grave. It cracked and jerked as it began to stand, unfolding like a moth.

The witch opened empty eyes and yawned. Shaz's fragile senses snapped and the witch stroked her hair.

"You have freed me my dear, my pretty descendant! You and your brother! For this you shall both be rewarded my babies!" smiled the witch, grating her words through a walnut voice box not used for speech for two hundred years. She reached into Shaz's handbag and lifted up the bottle of perfume. She sprayed it allover herself, its liberating scent settling on her parchment skin from head to toe. She kissed the girl's forehead and whispered 'Sharon'.

Cass found Shaz still sat on the grave rocking from side to side. There was a large hole in the ground next to her. The smell of Gothic was everywhere. 

In the distance he could just make out a dark figure with a strangely familiar gait shambling through the headstones towards the open arch.

He knelt down and held his girlfriend.

"That was our great great great Grandmother Cass! We're brother and sister!" she screamed.