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.