CAFE BLOOD

The craft course was in a beautiful rambling country pile in rural Nottinghamshire.

It was a gorgeous Sunday. The September light promised that summer's end was still some way off. The air was clear and a warm breeze blew through the estate.

Katrin was enrolled on a craft course there. Crafts for Novices it said on the ticket. It had been a Christmas gift from an unknown benefactor and Katrin had at long last found the time to go to this important event. Her facile work as a village vicar had kept her far too busy. 

In fact she was glad to get away and was actively reforming herself because after fifty years with the toothless Jesuit her faith in the Nazarene was gone. Increasingly delighting in the cruel and constant slurry of blasphemous bilge on TV Katrin was finding more and more truth in a world ruled not by God but by Satan. It made much more sense to her and she felt a new stimulus growing inside her like an egg. 

Sadly during this essential change she found no comfort at all in her insipid husband Daniel, as his allegiance to her was non-existent. He was increasingly spiteful and it was clear to Katrin that Daniel was fast becoming a thorn in her side and a distraction from her second path.

Daniel had come with Katrin because of the food and sat in the garden café of the country house with a book he’d bought on holiday in a charity shop. It was called "Suture" and was one of those well-thumbed 1970’s horror paperbacks with a bloody cover depicting a needle piercing someone’s lacerated skin. 

He ordered a cappuccino and a delicious-looking sausage sandwich and nestled down into his comfortable deckchair relishing three hours of peace and quiet and an escape from his Wife’s unending and unbearable tirades about how terrible the world was and how God had forsaken it.

He just wanted to delve into a fictitious realm of mindlessly violent blood loss and not have to listen to Katrin’s irksome stream of shite. God how he wished she’d join a cult or something and just fuck off.

The first large cappuccino turned into a second and third one. Daniel gratefully admired the lithe figure of the young siren who had waited on him. He planned to tip her well.

A late summer wasp poked its face into the sweet leftovers of the first two cups yet to be taken away. Daniel had purposefully hidden them on the next chair to get the siren back later. 

The wasp re-emerged with a mouth covered in froth and looked as if it had been gagged. Daniel smiled. 

"Serves you right wasp for sticking your beak into other peoples' business. Like Katrin!" he mused. 

Yes. Katrin was a black and white wasp buzzing round her needy congregation, removing unwanted baggage, bringing it home and poisoning him in the process. The world's nosiest dog-collared pest!

He smiled bitterly. He realised he was utterly sick of Katrin and had to leave her or else he might do something he would regret. Something biblical.

The bothersome insect was still hovering round his cups and getting way too close to him for comfort. Daniel had had enough. 

Taking an unused glass he trapped the insect on the table. The horned wasp stared at him hatefully and pounded the transparent walls of its new prison. Daniel could have sworn he momentarily saw Katrin's head on top of its stringy neck. He grimaced and felt a shudder run along his spine.

Shaking his head, he looked at his watch. Eleven am. Another two hours of peace. At least he hoped it would be peaceful. The first hour had perturbed him, his book offering only snatches of grisly comfort as he dealt with his pesky friend still incarcerated in the glass tower. 

What he had managed to read was basically a sordid tale where prisoners were experimented on without anesthetic. A black-garbed Judge asked them to repent before further sentences were passed, his particular favourite being the Y- incision and autopsy, naturally whilst the poor unfortunates were still fully conscious. These corrections he administered himself in a square, mirrored room, so the unrepentant could see their grisly descents into Hell.

Daniel had had enough Cappuccino so ordered a pot of tea for one. Once the attractive waitress had tended to his needs again he sat back to watch the comings and going’s of the garden cafe’s other guests. 

"It takes all sorts I suppose," he thought. "Look at them. Slurping coffee like sheep wittering on about their interminable problems to friends and family who just want to be somewhere else and not have to put up with the never ending swill of self pitying effluent streaming from their gobs!"

He imagined them all being taps, which he went round and turned off, twisting their heads till their mouths shut. He chuckled at this image and returned to Suture. The mad judge was busy slicing open someone's belly and lifting out entrails like presents.

It was nearly lunch and Daniel ordered a liver sandwich, a hangover from his Lancastrian childhood when offal had been half his diet. Kidneys, tripe, bone marrow, dripping and his favourite, liver, preferably pigs as they seemed to imbue it with extra succulence. 

He did feel sorry for those pigs but at least they ate well and never moaned about how shit everything was. Not like Katrin and her tiresome flock. All strung-up and uptight. No flavour at all he reckoned. Unforgiving meat. The judge would sort them out. 

"Yes. He certainly would!" he said aloud laughing. 

Some of his seated neighbours stared at him. He smiled and bit noisily into his liver.

The wasp in the glass was quiet. Exhausted from fruitless efforts to escape it sat in its cell, its torso heaving. Daniel uncharacteristically felt sorry for it now. The little devil was clearly beaten and had inevitably bowed to his greater mind. He, its mighty captor and master!

He lifted the glass and it flew straight at his forearm and stung him. The wasp’s stinger was so forcefully stabbed into his skin that once it had excitedly injected its venom it could not free itself. It buzzed and buzzed in helpless frustration.

Daniel screamed and leapt out of his chair. He saw the thing trapped in his flesh and clasped it with his thumb and forefinger, violently ripping it off. The stinger remained like a thorn topped with the insect's guts and as he touched it Daniel screamed again in agony. 

Everyone in the café was staring at him. He was sure they all had Katrin’s hateful grimace. He stormed off towards the building knocking over the table.

“Help. Help!” he bellowed as he staggered into the entrance clutching his increasingly swelling arm.

“I’ve been stung. Terribly stung!” 

Daniel was almost delirious with the scolding fire tearing through his limb when losing consciousness he fell headlong into the craft room where his wife Katrin was.

Daniel awoke surrounded by concerned faces. He was strapped to a table surrounded by figures dressed in black. They glared at him and tutted.

“So this is Daniel eh Katrin.”

“Yep. This is Daniel. A sorry specimen of a husband I have to admit.”

“Yes. Sorry. Well. If you are to progress to the next stage of the craft Katrin we will have to make Daniel sorry he was ever ejected from his mother’s God-smitten hole I'm afraid.”

A familiar face moved forward and Daniel was horrified to see it was the Judge in his book Suture.

He wore a dark hood and a bright red dog-collar. Around his neck was an upturned crucifix on a jet black rosary.

He spoke like a goat.

"You have been found guilty of obstructing a disciple of the Great Lord. How do you plead?

"I’m innocent! I'm innocent!"

"What does the chief witness say? What say you Katrin?"

"Guilty! Guilty as charged!"

"Guilty! Then so be it. You shall be punished accordingly Daniel."

The Head Priest nodded to Katrin who picked up a large blunt needle and thread. She commenced to pierce Daniel's lips and pull the thick thread through the flesh. 

"Katrin! No! Please! No! I shall change, I shall support you, I shall follow you! Please!"

Katrin stared at her husband and shook her head before continuing to sew his mouth together, Daniel shrieking in agony throughout the embroidery.

With blood flowing into his stitched lips Daniel stared in disbelief at the woman whom he'd once loved, now smiling at him as the High Priest stooped over him with a scalpel.

Mumbling through the tight sutures and writhing against his straps Daniel's eyes widened in abject horror as the sharp blade entered his breast and was drawn slowly down his abdomen toward his navel. Hot smoking blood gushed out like lava and flooded the table. 

The coven grinned, overjoyed with the prospect of Daniel's sacrifice to the Dark One. They dipped their fingers into his opening chest and licked the tips. The High Priest pushed on with the Y-incision and forced open the huge wound, slowly revealing Daniel's steaming entrails slopping between his ribcage.

There was a moment of pause while all the assembled company raised their hands high above their heads. At the rapturous cry of the High Priest all hands delved into Daniel and in an ecstasy of bloodlust pulled out fistfuls of wet organs and tubing, holding them in the air before nuzzling them theirs' and each other's faces.

It was Katrin who reached in last smiling broadly and menacingly. Her smile broadened close to his face as she clutched his still-beating heart and dragged it from its bloody roots. Daniel screamed so forcibly that his lips ripped open and from the mangled hole emitted such a blood-curdling yell that he passed out.

Daniel awoke with a start at his café table with his face in a saucer of tea. The wasp was positioned inside the glass, now seemingly full of blood, greedily siphoning up the warm scarlet liquid. Katrin was sitting next to him. She had blood round her lips and was wearing a crimson dog-collar and an upturned crucifix on a jet black rosary.

He quickly felt his lips. They were painfully ragged and peppered with agonising holes.

Panicking he fumbled to unbutton his shirt and stared at his chest feeling the skin with enquiring fingers.

A huge angry Y-incision was brutally stitched up all the way down his chest.

Daniel screamed and screamed in total horror and looked up as Katrin bit deeply into his glistening severed heart held in her hand.

RICHARD RAVEN, PAINTER

It was the summer of 1547. The sun baked the dense streets like a sadist. It reeked of shit and piss. Richard Raven strolled through it all. He wore a large beaked mask stuffed with herbs to keep the stink out. His black hood was up and his long dark cloak trailed in the sewage. He looked like a crow.

He entered his home knuckling the graveyard. It was crooked and its four front windows stared over the massing graves. They heaved like mole hills in the offended till. His home was his sanctuary. The Exorcist's House because Richard raven was an exorcist of paint.

When he painted people he could protect them. His portraits guarded them from their demons and for this he was handsomely rewarded by the grateful rich. This was the contract. Paint for monthly purses of gold and silver and you shall live a happy life free of torment and canker. This was the Raven's stipend, an allowance for the pain his rigours brought him. Recently those pains had worsened and he stooped often with increasing fatigue.

Still he endeavored to exorcise the coming dark with brushes and oils and his strokes of sanctuary hung on the walls of the City's elite like stays of execution. They were mounting too as if some foul edifice was braced above the town poised on the very brink. Their demons were massing.

The painter also assisted the poor and the decrepit of the slums near his house, the overwhelmed and the gangrenous teeming like rodents in the slurry creeping down from the high villas. He painted them freely requiring no payment but the obvious gratitude and sorrow seeping from their faces.

Thousands of these tiny paintings covered his own walls and Raven drew succour from the humility captured within. These were the seraphim in the hell they'd not constructed. The elvers in the priveleged piss. They too twitched like stricken flies at their dismal end. The gutters seemed fit to burst. Talk of malignancy hissed round the cramped alleys like a tide of adders; talk of Death and the Devil himself.

But Richard Raven had a weakness, which was also his escape from the banal, the strain and the growing unease.

He liked to eat and drink the finest meats and wines in the city's most expensive hostelries and bed the most sophisticated women of the night, who's clothes were lavish and quims were washed anew. For this decadence he strew his gold like confetti. Or rather, the gold of the fortunate and the bloated, piled high in the salted cellars of the exorcist's house, his hidden pension.

It was on a night such as this, a night of opulence and copulation that the beaked man staggered home under the misty smoke of the torches by the church.

"Raven!" whispered a voice in the darkness. "Richard Raven, Painter!"

A figure stepped out of the shadows and stood before the startled man.

"Yes. I am Raven. How can I be of service to you?"

"I am Merelda. Contessa of Stygia. I seek your famous skills as an artist of rare hue as I suffer the prospect of injurious blows this very eve."

"What ails you Contessa and I shall see if I can help."

"I am followed by a person of twisted character. A brute who wishes to do me harm. An ogre hell-bent on my mutilation and the violation of my very self."

"Who is this man?"

"He is a force of nature, a terrible lord, who's name remains unknown to me. I know him by his dreadful aura as you would do too".

"I need not meet the man but rather protect you from him If I am correct?"

"Yes. Yes. Oh please help me!"

The lady came closer and kissed the artist's hand and a sudden surge of temptation swept through him. His pulse quickened and he fevered under the mask.

"I shall help you Madame but I require recompense in advance and then monthly forthwith. How will you pay me?"

The Contessa blushed under the dusky torchlight and unfastened the top button of her velvet camisole. Her slow fluttering was unmistakable to Raven, a proffer of passion and a wage he immediately approved of.

He wished heatedly to bed this noble and show her the lengths he would go to capture her essence. He took her hand and walked into his house.

He handed the Countess Merelda a small glass of claret. She smiled and bowing he stepped into his wash room, where Raven removed his beaked mask and his hooded cloak and with spiced soap flannelled his hands, face and loin.

With more claret flowing and deep in the silks and taffetas of his boudoir he wooed the Contessa and felt his passion burgeoning like never before. Her visage, her perfume, her shapely curves all concocted a feverish desire in his weakening soul.

"No Richard! First you must paint me. Then you shall have me!" the Contessa advised.

Raven flicked and dabbed through the night to render the Lady's impression onto his canvas. He was distracted throughout but by and by it was done.

"It is complete Contessa".

The Stygian royal stood in front of her portrait perfectly still.

"You have done well Richard, esteemed painter, but I am unsure of you have captured my truest of natures".

"I have tried my very best my Lady and wish most eagerly to now take you to my bed and describe further my technique," cooed Raven.

"Of course Richard, you shall have me but first you must see me fully in the atelier's light."

The Contessa began to slowly remove her garments; the velvets, the brocades, the camisole. When her petticoat was all that remained Raven held his breath.

It fell and in the dusk of the artist's room revealed a body so hateful, so inhuman that he held his hands over his mouth.

The Lady's breasts were those of a cow, her arms the twisting, biting lengths of serpents, her waist the hairy hide of a warthog and her legs .. it was her legs that made Richard Raven scream, a scream that left the Exorcist's house and carried down the cramped streets of the city like a mad crier.

The Contessa's legs were those of a goat, matted with thick brown hair. Her feet were coarse cloven hooves. Raven stared in disbelief and gagged.

His eyes rose slowly to the head and there .... before him .... was the horned Devil! Lucifer himself!

"You have been busy Richard. I thought I'd better pay you a visit myself before you put me out of business in this Godforsaken hovel completely! I hope you approve of my guise, the voluptuous Contessa, whom I knew would ... erm, wet your palette so to speak! You may still bed me should you wish but I advise against it unless you wish to be incinerated by my particular hot passions!"

"No!"

"Ah, No! As I expected. I have no wish to char your manhood Richard but I do wish to burn all of your paintings. My demons have waited quite long enough and they do so wish to plague your townsfolk so diligently once again. I aim to set them free from your pesky canvas prison".

"You may still wish to bed the Contessa before I start Richard. On the house. Your last brush with lust you might say."

"No. No thankyou".

"Ah well, Never mind. I am keen to free my friends anyway, so they may degrade this pathetic town afresh. I think I shall begin with my Asteroth, who has been sorely missed by his Duchy of pain."

Satan stared at the painting of an Admiral in which his Arch Duke of Hell was bound in a second portrait behind it.

"Ah yes. Asteroth my old infernal fellow. Naturally the Admiral will suffer a terrible demise I'm afraid."

"No! My Lord Satan!" intervened Raven, "Perhaps start here! My own self portrait! You know you want to and since I am plagued by many demons you will release them all at once, a veritable windfall of devils and I shall perish right before you!"

"Hmm. a most enticing proposition Richard. A windfall you say. I like the sound of that. Let the devilry begin!"

Satan whiplashed his flaming fork-tail and lit the painting. It flared in a noisy sizzle of oils and Raven's image quickly sagged and wilted.

The painter began to sweat and cough.

Lucifer laughed.

"Soon this town will be writhing in my demons' filth again and you my friend will hang on MY wall for eternity in my gallery of despair!"

As the rear painting caught as well the painter coughed a little more but then looked up at Satan and smiled.

"Why do you smile so Painter? You have little to delight you I would have thought!"

"I'm smiling because you have not inspected those portraits closely enough my Lord Lucifer. In fact you have simply taken my word for it!"

"What are you talking about mortal, I can clearly see that it's you in the frame you dullard!"

"Ah, but is it? In fact it is not me, it is my twin brother Clifford, who has been dead these past ten years, ensnared and heinously murdered by your mistress The Black Death. He lies not one hundred feet away in the graveyard, where I had him interred, whilst vowing vengeance on pestilence and your Hellish breed."

"What! Dead? the Black Death? You trickster Raven! You talentless dauber! And who in Satan's name is on the second portrait?"

"Why, you are correct My Lord Lucifer!"

"What!"

"It is you that I have painted! You Satan! You Lucifer! In truth you were my Brother's demon and his executioner, the Blackened Death simply your idiotic slave. It is you that is burning in oil!"

As the painting of the Devil went up in flames the smell of searing soulless flesh filled the room as Satan began to burn. Though born of flame and fire, this vengeful charring was a pogrom he could not withstand and with a final glare of primal rage toward the smiling painter, he spread his blazing wings and smashed through the roof of the Exorcist's House and sought the solace of his foul abyss.

"I shall return Raven! Mark my words! I shall return!" bellowed the Devil.

The painter laughed even louder.

"I think not you Fallen fool!" Raven chortled, "Look!"

The painter held up a whole stack of portraits he'd made of Satan and howled in triumph.

"Damn you Raven! Damn your soul to Hell!"

As Lucifer flew smouldering into the Pit Raven looked toward his brother's grave, where a curl of smoke was rising.

Raven smiled.

"Rest in peace my dear Brother; after my brush with the Devil by God's grace I live on yet to fight another day."

The painter then raised a glass of claret to the oil of the grinning Contessa still glistening on his easel.

"My Lady," he bowed.