DRILOSPHERE

An short audio piece.

Something different.

THE HILLS OF ORE

It was hot in early summer that year.

Temperatures were increasing every day. Global warming they said.

30,40,45 degrees and like the rest of humanity, it was unbearable for the people of the Ore Mountains.

Global meltdown had kicked in and the land was baking. Roads ran. Tarmac doughed. Fields fell and the soil cracked like the dried paint of old masters.

Heat shimmer gave the hills an eerie feel, distant mirages of sleeping giants. Fata Morganas.

The news reported records being broken virtually every day as the suns rays microwaved the unprotected globe. It was all over the world. Climate Change was happening and summer temperatures were spiralling out of control.

Dwar tried his best to keep cool. The shutters of his traditional home were shut tight and inside was more or less in complete darkness if he turned the lights off. He had enough food to last another week and then he would have to drive to town to stock up. Hopefully it would be cooler then.

It was on the day the mercury in his thermometer was nudging towards 50 degrees that Dwar noticed a change for the worse. His phone line was dead and the plastic bungs around his shutters had started to melt. He put on his sun hat and walked gingerly out into the full glare of the burgeoning sun blast. 

The phone cables had melted and the tyres on his truck had wilted like old dogs. It was too hot for basic materials to stay intact outside anymore.

Whilst grabbing the last of the tinned food from the covered rear of his truck he noticed his neighbours across the way. Like him and most of the hamlet they were descendants of the mountain workers who had originally mined the ore buried in the hills long ago and he got on with them well.

He could see Zwer dragging something along the hot gravel. Dwar squinted and to his horror realised that he was dragging his wife's body, leaving a trail of thick red blood behind him.

Dwar ran over to his friends shouting "Zwer, Zwer, what are you doing? What's happened to Kleen?"

Zwer heard Dwar and dropped Kleen's head with a thud. It turned towards the running man and reaching out she gargled his name.

"Dwaaaaaar!"

Zwer stared at Dwar who had reached the drive and raised a huge ore pick he had in his grip. Using both hands be brought it down hard on the side of Kleen's face. It pinned her head to the ground like an insect and her blood sizzled on the roasting surface.

"What in God's name have you done Zwer?" screamed Dwar as he reached the scene of the atrocity. But Zwer was not in the mood for explanations and raised his ore pick once again and stepping over his dead wife he lurched towards his neighbour.

"There is no God Dwar, there are only the demons of the fire. I have seen them!" he growled and Dwar realised that Zwer meant to kill him too. He could see it in his old friend's eyes. They were mad and as lifeless as the ore seams they'd once mined.

Dwar ran from the madman and sprinted home in the remorseless heat but not before seeing villagers fighting in the hamlet's square down the road. He watched in terror as his kinfolk hacked each other to pieces with whatever was to hand: cleavers, spades, forks, scythes, sickles and more ore pick axes.

The village clock was spattered with blood and the gore overflowed from the well's oak bucket. It was a bloodbath and .... they had noticed Dwar!

He turned and ran for his life as the sun-crazed villagers who were left ran after him shrieking and snarling as their weapons glinted in the midday sun, their skin reddening like hide.

Dwar reached his house on the hillside and pressed the button for the steel shutter to release. He hoped that the electrics on the inside hadn't fried. 


"C'mon, c'mon!" he raged through gritted teeth.

They hadn' t failed yet and he heard with immense gratitude the clink of the shutter as it rolled down. The back door was already screened off as were all the windows.

He stood behind the door in his dark living room and listened to the mob smash at the steel roller. He backed away and sat in an armchair in the middle of the floor, the darkness comforting him as his friends went insane.

"Had the whole world gone crazy?"

He shuddered at the thought and Dwar sat all night until there was silence outside. His shuttering had kept them out thank God. 

"What in Christ's name had happened to them. They were like devils!" he mused as he shakily reached for the tap for a glass of water. The tap spluttered but the liquid that came out wasn't water. It was instead a thick red steaming sludge that gave off an unpleasant smell of rotten eggs and decaying flesh.

The frightened man immediately set about making ready to leave. He could not survive much longer in his home if there was no water supply. It would only be a matter of days before he died of thirst. He had plenty of tinned food though and decided on the spot where he must go.

Inside the Ore Mountains.

There was a plentiful water system in there and the ore mine tunnels would keep him cool. 

Dwar filled his wooden handcart with tins, candles, pans and supplies and opened the peep hole in the back door shutter. There was no-one to be seen in the night's blackness and he carefully raised the shutter. 

Stepping into the hot night he checked his thermometer. It read 50 degrees. At night. 

The heat was inescapable outdoors and nobody could survive it for long. With night-time temperatures so high already the following day would be lethal to life for certain and there was no-time to lose getting underground.

Dwar entered the sulphur ore mine as his father had done before him countless times in the days when ore was shipped to the refineries in the valley belching thick smoke into the heavens night and day. That was before the world's ozone layer had evaporated and the sky was left unguarded to the sun's full and inimical force.

He had visited the mine many times with his Father and knew his way. He lit a candle and holding it in a small tin holder he walked cautiously through the tunnels of his youth.

It was a pleasant 20 degrees throughout the initial cuts but Dwar noticed jumps in the mercury as he got near the mouths of deeper shafts. He fancied he had also glimpsed red flames in the shadows but dismissed this as stress-induced reverie.

He strolled on into the far tunnels of the mountain for hours and decided to settle down for what he calculated was another night above ground.

Dwar opened tins of beans and had his last half-loaf in the flickering light of his candle, which cast shadows onto the ancient hewn walls like a strange puppet show. He slept in the dark. In the morning he would have to descend to the lower mines if he was to find water.

He was awoken by a dull sound reverberating through the tunnels. He stood and walked to where he thought it came from.

The source was a deep shaft incised into the rock floor, which fell towards the bowels of the mine where the best ore was to be found. 

As Dwar approached he was now sure that he could see a red glow emanating from the wide mouth of the shaft. The dull sound was now also a deep resonating series of rhythmic clangs as if industry had sprung up once more.

Seeing a steel ladder descending he decided to climb down. He filled his knapsack with some provisions and stepped on the ladder. the clanging was now much louder and crimson glow meant that he could easily see where he was going.

As he got deeper into the shaft the temperature rose and he began to feel anxious and had second thoughts about any further descent. But he took a nip of rum from his hip flask, rallied himself and went lower.

The banging and clunking was now almost unbearable and the red light was clearly the glow of a huge fire as it flickered and quivered around him.

The steel ladder had grown hot too but if he was to find a plentiful water supply he had to get to the mine's wet bowels.

As the steel became intolerable and the noise rose to an ear-splitting cacophony, Dwar was just about to give up and give in to the mad symphony, when his fell-boots touched the hard rock floor.

He quickly released the hot grip of the ladder and noticed the welts forming on his palms. But it was the now ever-more jarring din and hair-singeing heat behind him that made Dwar turn slowly as he felt almost uncontrollable fear grip his entire body.

What he saw chilled him to the very core of his being and seared his mind with a terror no other mortal had ever had to suffer.

Gathered in front of him was a throng of the most hideous things he had ever seen. Thousands of small scarlet horned beings, which covered the floor of a vast cavern aglow with fire.

Some of the beings were running feverishly around another shaft from which burst huge red flames and some of the things were tending heinous machines pulsating with massive moving cogs and gears, the bellows of desolation. Yet others were pounding the mine's yellow ores on a myriad of anvils and casting the powder aloft above the central shaft, where it burnt in the smoke, the fumes of brimstone filling the fetid air.

Dwar knew instinctively that what he was seeing was an army of demons and that this was surely then the ante-chamber to Hell itself and he shuddered violently at this most blasphemous of visions.

But he knew he was right and when his rubber belt melted and his tin water flask fell to the ground the clang by the ladder drew the attention of the nearest smoking devils hammering their anvils.

They turned and stared at him and as they did Dwar felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, singe and burn off as acrid smoke. His rum also steamed away. His clothing caught fire and fell off in flames. His hair flared and was gone and his skin scorched from head to toe, hardened like leather and turned bright red. He screamed.

Before his humanity left him entirely he felt two small horns push through the skin at each side of his reddened head and a strong pointed tail erupt from his rump. When complete he smiled a new smile of sharpened teeth and loped off to join the other lesser imps at the edge.

No longer Dwar, he now waited with his infernal kin for the arrival of the Fallen One, the Twisted Angel, who was ascending the central shaft on a mantle of hideous magma.

The flames were growing across the world. The factory-fingered sky of Men had finally burned away that afternoon and, like the water table Dwar once so desperately sought, Hell-fire would rise and overflow this very day and flood the world with a tide of evil from which there would be no return.

As once-Dwar looked on he knew all this with new-found clarity and threw sulphur into the ring like confetti. His past life corroded away entirely as if portraits in an oven.

He shook with pleasure as a crimson colossus rose slowly from the deep and gripped the rim of the shaft with gargantuan clawed fingers, dragging its vast frame out onto the glowing ground.

The giant stretched out its arms and its face beamed with the rictus smile of death before its amassed servants

The assembled ranks craned their necks as their master rose and when fully erect they fell to their knees.

As the Devil himself stood before them they muttered in unity one single chant of adulation, a sibilant hymn which ricocheted off the walls, along the reddening tunnels and out into a world in flames.

"Satan is risen! Satan is risen!"

GOSSAMERS OF PLASM

Dead, I am silked, a thread secreted into the world.

I feel the shiver of others like me drifting in and out of the Living; a billowing swill of dead personalities ebbing and flowing in God's big tide.

We are everywhere; the gasses of death, filling, cupping, pooling, seeping, bubbling. We are the spectres, the phantoms, the spirits and the ghosts. An ecto-system of passings.

I walk across the breath of my family and cloud their eyes. Sometimes I can lift a bed-sheet and stretch when no-one is looking. Or at least I don't think they are.

Its strange being dead. Being a ghost.

Imagine breathing on a cold glass in an empty house or trying to bottle the last whispers of thought before sleep.

We are the lonely denizens of darkness, the misty weather of silence and the undigested dreams of worms.

We enter things. We can enter you as long as there are liquids.

We rest in spirit levels and thermometers; blisters of past lives nighting in the things we know. Measuring the straights helps us remember. Shaking the mercury restores our hope that we too will catch a fever once again.

Sometimes we congregate and imagine Heaven. You call them rainbows. We arc together on paths of memory, holding hands, skipping like schoolkids in the hues of our yesterdays.

Sometimes we moan when there is nothing left. No hope. No future. Just the prison of being where we once lived, the traces of our existence. It is our eternal sadness, our infinite tears that drive the leprous engines of the after-life.

Spent. Redundant. Done. I think I feel but I'm unsure what it is that's happened. Above is a sea of oxygen, which I cannot breathe. Anaerobic. I am the opposite of being. The perpetual gasp of breathing-out.

Nudging into other floating wisps, I stand and stare, sensing nothing, chewing nails I do not have. 

My sails of life lie still, flat; like lungs of fog, paper bags.

Pirates have stolen our world, lashed to a shipless mast in seas of deep regret.

Weeded, dug in, boxed, burnt. When my memories of the life I loved turn to soil I will turn to hate for sustenance.

As others do, we shall haunt you.

WORKING LATE

Trough was working late again.

The word work was actually stretching the truth. Trough was a bean-counter who was feathering his own nest again at the expense of others. 

For some reason his avarice came to a peak on Friday nights when everyone else, his underlings, had left the office.

He'd opened his accountancy firm during the fattened years when money grew on the trees of the city. Trough Deeply and Co. Deeply, his old partner was long gone. Died under suspicious circumstances when things got rough with Trough's new friends in the underworld. Now it was just Trough and Co. And his nose was well and truly in it!

Trough's latest nefarious scheme involved the local city zoo. For years he had been cooking the books and creaming off the top. It was a very prestigious zoo and attracted a great deal of sponsorship and grants, which the zookeepers worked tirelessly to win.

Trough had creamed off the top since the very beginning and the zoo was starting to run out of cash. The staff just couldn't understand what was going on. Animal feed had to be rationed and some prize specimens sold off to other zoos. It didn't make sense and they had sent the Chairman of the Board, a rather weak individual, to confront Trough several times as he was responsible for the accounts. Somehow he always managed to dodge the bullet, explaining the shortcomings away in a swirl of financial gobbledegook, which the befuddled Chair seemed to all-too-readily accept.

It was a tough world and overheads were getting higher was the line Trough sold and he had got good at spinning this tale. It was if he was coated in teflon. The zoo was falling to bits and the animals were starving but none of it stuck to him. He was enjoying the finest wine and thick juicy steaks in top restaurants. He just couldn't believe his luck and got greedier and greedier as time went on.

But there were murmurs in the zoo, among the staff and in the pens. Murmurs that were getting louder. He had had to step in to quell the muttering and had come up with something that would razzledazzle everyone and they'd forget about his pilfering.

Tonight he was throwing a big fundraiser in the zoo's Board Room, an event with enough pazzaz to woo the city's elite into opening their wallets and placate those nosey malcontents among the staff. It was a win win and Trough was set to make a killing. He was really quite pleased with himself especially as, apart from a few phone calls to prospective donors, he had hardly lifted a finger to make this jamboree happen.

After having the idea and soliciting some clients, Trough had handed the legwork over to the facile Chairman and his irksome zookeepers, who annoyingly had added an idea of their own to the proceedings at the last minute. The fundraiser would also be in fancy dress and the official invites went out asking attendees to dress up.

Trough had received an invite as a matter of course. He didn't bother looking. His secretary had opened it up and he knew she would have organised something for him to wear. Besides, the fundraiser was his idea anyway. The zookeepers were just lackeys. It was juicy T-bones and Bolinger for him as soon as he spirited away the bulging coffers and piles of cheques at the end of the night. Yep, it was going to be his grand overture and he'd begun to plan his retirement after this score. He would cross the border and be gone by morning living the high life he so richly deserved. Yes, la dolca vita would be Trough's at last!

He busied himself with the final preparations for his midnight flit. Passport, ID card, a huge sports bag of cash, gun, bullets, clothes and toiletries.

"Those stinking animals, why the hell should they have it cozy when it should be me living it up. Serves 'em right for being fucking stupid" argued Trough to himself as he stuffed some fifty notes into his back-pocket, "and as for those dumb keepers and that pathetic Chair. They deserve to be shafted and I'm happeeeeeee to oblige!"

Just one last thing to do. Find the damn invite to check the start time. He didn't want to be late and miss out of some serious money. Oh and that damn costume his dozy secretary had hopefully left him somewhere. He scoured his desk, looked underneath it but couldn't see anything.

"The docile bitch, where the fuck has she left it!" he roared.

As he turned round he saw a long bag hung on the coat stand and a large envelope.

"Ah!"

There it was. By the door. He opened the invite to check. He only had ten minutes! He'd better get his skates on. "So what kind of fancy dress have those imbeciles come up with?" he chuntered.

THE WILD ANIMAL BALL. 

PLEASE COME DRESSED AS YOUR FAVOURITE ZOO ANIMAL!

DRINKS AND NIBBLES 7PM

"Not bad!" he agreed and ripped open his costume bag.

"A bear! A fucking bear!" he bellowed but then saw the irony of it. Yes, he was a bear. A predator among pointless pigeons. He pulled on the suit and looked through the eye slits at the office around him. He smiled, growled and left for the zoo across the street.

Trough had expected to see a whole string of Bentleys and Daimlers lining the road but there weren't any. Maybe they were parked in the public car park at the rear. Yep, that must be it. The hapless fools on the staff had actually done something right for once. A bit of pampering for the town's elite would pay dividends later when they had to get their cheque books out and that meant more money for him!

It was 6.45pm. The zoo was already closed for the day but the side staff-entrance was still open. Trough was met by someone in the yard dressed as a chimpanzee and assumed it to be the Chairman of the Board. Chairman Chimp. Yes! It fitted perfectly, a gormless ape if ever there was one and Trough would fleece him and his lackeys good and proper tonight. He'd be on easy street before they could say where's the bananas!

"Good evening Trough. Welcome to the Wild Animals Ball. I see you have come suitably attired. A very dapper Grizzly I must say. You will find that your clients have arrived and are waiting for you. Help yourself to nibbles as you walk in. You know nibbles don't you! ha ha. We've organised some light entertainment. Enjoy," chortled the Chair chimp with a rueful smile under his ape mask.

Trough-Bear avoided the stairs and made his way into the lift. He'd worked hard all day and was feeling the strain of cooking the books so damn well. For some reason the lift stank of piss, strong piss at that, pooling in the corners and speckled with thick silver hairs. How disgusting and what a way to greet his illustrious clientele! 

"Those cretinous zookeepers were meant to be looking after them, not showering them with fucking urine!" he fumed.

He reached the third corridor were the Zoo Board Room was and left the lift, only to be greeted by a huge pile of steaming shit on the threadbare carpet.

"What the fuck is going on?" roared Trough, "Those dirty bastards! How am I meant to raise money when I'm surrounded by idiots!"

He found a brush and shovel in the cleaning cupboard and swept up the shit and deposited it in the staff kitchen swing-bin. He removed his bear mitts and washed his hands. Drying up, he could have sworn he had heard growling coming from the Board Room. It must have been the hand dryer whirring in his ears.

He strode down the corridor and nearly tripped over a rack of tranquiliser guns stood near the doorway. 

"Jeeesus Christ! What in God's name are those bastard tranq guns doing here! Those fucking idiots, they'll scare off the money!"

Raging, he opened the door to the main room and was about to tear a strip off the first member of staff he found when he stopped short and just stood staring at the space before him. 

The main lights were off except for the emergency ceiling lights, which cast a murky jaundiced glow over the room. Squinting in his bear mask he thought he could make out movement in the far corners.

"Hello!" he shouted.

"Hello!" he tried again, this time louder.

He thought he heard a dull snarl in the amber gloom when suddenly he was shoved forward and the door behind him slammed shut and locked.

"What the fuc.....!" he blurted as he toppled over a table of what felt like raw meat and thick liquid and went sprawling with it across the peeling wooden floor.

As he was trying to kneel up in his bear suit, now plastered with sticky meat and something iron sweet, the main switches were thrown and the room filled with blinding light. Trough squeezed his eyes together, then slowly opened them as he adjusted to the brightness.

He was kneeling in a pool of thick red blood and his suit was smothered in raw minced steak and offal. It was dripping off him in scarlet globs and Trough retched like a full pig.

It was about then that he heard the two sounds. At first they merged into each other, a muffled noise, but after a second or two he could hear them distinctly; deep growling and loud laughing.

The noise was coming from the far corner he'd noticed as he walked in but now he could see what was growling . 

Gathered around a long table of huge chewed cow bones was a rabble of figures, who appeared to be dressed as animals like him. Several with wolf outfits, a couple of hyenas, a tiger figure and like him, someone dressed as a large grizzly bear. They were standing, scratching, snarling, lunging and pushing the bones off the table. Fights broke out and teeth gnashed like real animals.

They were hugely convincing dressed in their suits and Trough was immensely impressed with this fundraising gimmick that the usually moronic zookeepers had pulled off.

It was genius! His clients would love it!

But it was the marabou stork that landed near him which shook his belief in what he was seeing. No-one could be dressed as a stork let alone fly across the room! Just what on God's earth was happening here?

If Trough needed any more proof that all was not what it seemed then it was the wolf that broke from the pack that did it.

Having pissed all over a bookcase, the colossal silver and grey wolf was glaring at him, its gummed fangs bared like a vampire, its nostrils flared wide open. It snarled viciously and its lips trembled with hate for the blood-soaked bear-man on its knees.

Trough gasped in horror.  In shock he realised that this was a real wolf heading his way. What the fuck was happening? His mind reeled to make sense of things. This was meant to be his meal-ticket, the fundraiser to his retirement. Where the fuck where his clients? What the hell was a timber wolf doing here?

He didn't have time to answer, as the wolf, clearly emaciated and starving, loped slowly towards its quarry, saliva dribbling from its lethal jaws.

Trough screamed and tried to stand in the crimson slick, only to fall face down in the gore. As he turned his head he saw where the laughing was coming from. In the next room, which had walls of thick glass for demonstrations, stood that buffoon of a Chairman, now without his chimp outfit, the dumb-ass zookeepers and most startling of all, all his clients!

"What the ....!" he shrieked.

The company were assembled safely behind the glass and clear;y having a good time. Everyone had glass of champagne in their hand and some deftly-made sandwich or caviar vol-au-vent in the other. They were having a party for God's sake railed Trough. They were having a party and clearly watching him through the glass!

He turned to look at the wolf and then back to the laughing throng now pressed up against the windowed wall clearly egging the wolf on!

"You bastards! I'll get you for this! You'll see if I don't!" he howled.

The huge creature leapt into the air and landed upon Trough like a ton weight. It smacked him back down to the bloody floor and knocked the wind out of him. His bear mask flew off and the wolf straddled his suited body with its four massive paws. The wild animal had Trough pinned down and slowly lowered its drooling open jaws towards his trembling face.

Trough let out a blood-curdling scream, which rang around the entire room, agitating the gang of beasts gnawing on the bones.

The scream also sent the watching assembly of clients and staff into a frenzy of excitement. They quaffed more champagne and gnashed voraciously on cooked chicken legs, smearing the fat in arcs across the plate glass wall and yelling for blood!

"C'mon, wolfy, eat the greedy fucker! Serves him right! He's been stiffing us all for years so eat hiiiiiim!" roared the donors spilling slimy caviar onto their chins.

As if on cue, the wolf let out a heinous snarl and took Trough's neck entirely in its mouth. Trough continued screaming but stopped abruptly as the brute's long teeth bit deeply into his throat. Hot red bubbling blood pulsed out and the wolf lapped at the red fountain showering its face.

Readying for the killing bite, the wolf was suddenly thrown across the room as a gigantic male tiger rammed into it at full force. The wolf revived and snarled but the Tiger's ear-splitting roar sent it whimpering with its tail hung low.

The tiger placed a giant paw on Trough's chest, its talons piercing the fur outfit and penetrating his flabbed flesh. The ailing accountant winced in agony as he tried to stem the pulse of blood from his neck. The tiger licked his bloodied face but was halted by a booming snarl erupting from a famished bear closing in at speed. 

It swiped the tiger hard and sent it sprawling along the blood like a skater. The tiger bellowed with fury and faced the grizzly now towering over it. The two titans set to in a blaze of fur and claw with the rest of the animals looking on with nervous respect.

Trough, half dazed from blood loss, sensed his chance, rolled onto his side and managed to kneel and then stand up. He staggered towards the windowed wall, where the cheering party yowled with laughter, as he swirled his bloody paws across the glass like a deranged window cleaner. 

"He-help me! hel-help me!" he begged his old clients, red froth bubbling from his mouth.

This gurgling appeal sparked a whole new wave of drinking and jostling, which reached an even louder pitch of horseplay and howling. The drumstick-chewing mob hurled themselves at the glass, threw themselves at each other and tipped bubbly over one another's heads. The yells of ectasy crescendoed when Trough was pinned against the window by a hideous pair of hyenas, gnarled and thinned, ravenous with desire for injured juiced flesh like his,

Each bit firmly into Trough and tore at his sides, the flimsy outfit offering no protection from their unearthly jaws as they gutted him standing before his audience like a practised execution. 

As Trough collapsed onto his own hot innards the watching horde screamed with rapture and two of the loudest men began to tear off the two female keepers' clothes. The two drunken men roared with lust as the keepers' breasts sagged out of their ripped vests and on a surging tide of arousal wrestled off their suits and flung themselves onto the shocked women.

Sensing an orgy in the making the rest of the cavorting red-faced male clients turned on their female counterparts, grabbing at their tops with fumbling paws. Some clients joined the first two now straddling the screaming zookeepers.

The male keepers, initially entertained, were now quaking with a rising bore of anger as they looked on while their helpless female colleagues were being molested by a pack of fat quivering tycoons.

"Stop!" they roared with no apparent effect. The snarling donors continued to grab and thrust at the figures beneath them on the wooden floor.

Trough, who now more than regretted working late that night, felt his life finally ebb away with all his plans in the snouts of hyenas. 

The last thing he saw through the greased plate glass was unusually of a harpoon impaling itself in the thick skull of one of his clientele.

THRUMP!

The sound of the shaft plunging into the solid head of the wide-eyed male brought proceedings on both sides of the glass to a momentary standstill.

The eerie pause was only broken when the leggy and utterly repellent marabou stork flew across the Board Room, hitting the window glass angrily, landing next to Trough, now entirely dead and still. The hideous bird crammed its hairless face deep inside the accountant's corpse, rummaging for prized sweetmeats and organs. It slid out its head slicked with gore and gulping down a huge hunk of liver stared up at the spellbound herd.

As the marabou's beak snapped shut it was the clarion call for the donors and keepers to resume their drink-fueled fray. 

While the wild animals of the zoo gathered to take turns feeding on Trough's ample body parts, the human fracas took an even deadlier note as the naked clients ran screeching towards the keepers brandishing whatever implements they could find: barbecue forks, chicken shears, cheese wires, carving knives and steak hammers. The keepers met them with harpoons, dart guns, chains and snare sticks. 

It was carnage behind the screen as the savages howled their vitriol at each other. Outrage upon outrage was enacted upon the baying cast. Blood welled and splattered on the glass, flesh bounced off the walls and extremities settled in shining gouts of fresh blood. Bellies were slit, fat buttered, muscles penetrated and sinews scissored.

By the end of the night nothing behind the glass was left alive and a sickening mash of guts and limbs steamed in the silent light of the demonstration room. 

The animals of the zoo, sated by Trough's truffled plenty, stared through the glass sensing somehow that things had changed forever.

They turned and headed for the dark stairwell leading to the bottom door. From here they streamed into the late night and their new-found freedom from the zoo. They were still hungry.

Working late, the owner of a nearby abattoir looked up from his slab.

He was sure he'd heard howling in his yard!

FENDRIX

Fendrix was called a wierdo at school.

Wierdo, wierdo went the chant, all day long.

In the end he began to think it was his proper name. Wierdo.

Every day the other kids ignored who he really was and just saw the outside, his spots, his specs, his baby face.

Even the Year 6 teacher seemed to join in, always asking him stuff in front of the others, embarrassing him.

He went home with their name-calling ringing in his ears, only stopping when he slammed the front door shut on the world and saw his Mum, who always met him in the hallway.

He looked at her. He’d stopped taking his medication for a few weeks now but his Mum had no idea. He was sick of feeling like a zombie, but his moods seemed to be getting worse.

Fendrix didn’t say a lot to his Mum when he got in. She had learnt to leave him alone most of the time and just be there for him when he needed it. Mealtimes. Getting ready for school and briefly when he got home. 

The rest of the time he spent alone in his room. She had tried to get him to go outside in the sun but had given up long ago. Fendrix was happiest with just himself and life was easier that way.

As normal he went upstairs to his room, locked his door from the inside and sat down on the carpet to admire his Action Men. He had a lot of Action Men and had arranged them in the same way as his school class in year 6.

Each Action Man represented a kid in the class and he’d managed to get hold of some Sindy’s for the handful of girls. They sat on chairs in front of tables. Some he’d made and some were toys.

Fendrix was the teacher of this plastic rabble and it was he who decided who to embarrass or not.

This was his class.

“Ratton, you rodent, tell me the name of your mother”

“Barbie” replied the Action Man Ratton.

“Wrong Ratton! She’s called bitch! Slut bitch! What’s she called Ratton?” 

boomed Mr. Fendrix prodding the doll-boy firmly with his wooden ruler.

“Slut Bitch, Sir”.

“Correct! And Arbuckle, you great thick pudding, am I in charge of this class and all the horrible scrotes in it?”

Leaning over, Fendrix pulled the cord at the back of the Talking Action Man.

“Yes Sir!” “Yes Sir!” “Yes Sir!” …….

The cord must have jammed as Arbuckle-man didn’t stop talking.

“Stop talking boy!” screamed Fendrix.

“No!” blurted the doll and suddenly stood up out of its chair. It raised its articulated arms and shrieked:

“No! You wierdo!”

Fendrix stared at the doll and stood up, towering over it with his ruler. The doll craned its neck backwards and stared upwards at him.

“You fuckin’ wierdo!” it said again.

Suddenly all the dolls got up out of their chairs and began to chant in unison as they moved closer to the front;

“Weird! Weirdo! Weirdo! Weirdo!”

Fendrix was dumbfounded: uncontrollably furious and frightened in equal measure and ran out of his bedroom panting. He stood on the landing in his school shorts trying to catch his breath, large tears of rage forming in his eyes.

They were just as bad as the kids at school, those fuckin dolls.

His Mum had been decorating the bathroom and had left a box of tools outside. Fendrix noticed the big box of beige masking tape rolls and picked one out. 

He nailed the end of it and pulled a long piece from the roll. It made a satisfying ripping sound as he tore it off and Fendrix smiled.

He returned to his ‘class’, where all the toy children were sat back in their seats silent and still.

Fendrix walked round the back of the group with the masking tape hidden behind his back.

Arbuckle.

He would pay, the little bastard.

Fendrix grabbed hold of the Talking Action Man. It struggled in his hands and mumbled as the boy smothered its loose mouth.

“Mm”, “Mm”, “Mm” it stuttered through Fendrix’s fingers tightening round its velvety head.

“I’ll show you Arbuckle! I’ll show you, you fuckin ingrate! You won’t be saying much after this!”

Clasping the writhing doll, Fendrix began to bind the masking tape around it’s legs. First its boots and khaki trousers were completely bound, then its ammo belt, arms, camo jacket and finally its chin.

To finish its head off Fendrix had to uncover the mouth, at which point the doll, glaring at the boy with eagle eyes, blurted out “We’re  gonna fuckin get you for this wierdo, you just wait till tomorrow, we’re gonna fuckin have you!”

Fendrix taped his mouth finally shut and viewed his handiwork.

He’d done a good job. None of Arbuckle’s body was showing at all. He’d mummified him like King Tut! The boy chuckled at the thought and placed the taped doll back in its place, straight and stiff.

By midnight he had taped up his entire class of Action Men and Sindys. They leant against their chairs erect like the dead. Fendrix was thrilled. There was no more back chat and no more name calling.

He went to bed happy clutching Arbuckle.

In the morning Fendrix was unusually sunny thought his Mum. He wolfed down his reddy brek, pretended to take his meds and got ready for school, the last day before Summer when kids could take in any food, games and music they wanted.

Freedom beckoned and the prospect of a long carefree holiday shone like a jar of new scissors.

He gave his Mum a kiss and headed out of the door carrying a large shoulder bag.

“What have you got in the bag son?” she asked.

“Tapes Mum. Just tapes.” Said Fendrix smiling.

THE EGG

They sat at the kitchen table staring at the egg.

They’ d found it in the garden.

It was pale blue and quite small. It was placed between the toast rack and the marmalade.

“What is it dear?”

“I don’t know. I think its an egg”.

They sat quietly munching toast and drinking tea, all the while looking at the turquoise shell that had now joined them.

They finished their toast and read the morning papers. Now and then they peered over the local news at the blue egg.

The headline read “Blown to Smithereens: Landmine kills Local Girl”

“She would have liked this egg dear”

“I know. She was a keen naturalist wasn’t she.”

On the mantelpiece was a photograph of a young female soldier, proud and resolute in the sunshine of her life. Next to her was a folded letter from the Ministry explaining how she’d been protecting children when a mine had gone off. She was killed instantly and they should be very proud. She was a hero.

The breakfast table had carried on being set for three as usual since they’d got the letter two weeks ago. Plate, knife, spoon, cup and saucer, egg cup and a folded napkin. Like they’d always done.

The elderly couple both gazed at the space behind their daughter’s chair, a space stretching into the endless infinite of nothing. It would go on forever if they could have seen that far.

They looked at each other, smiled and held hands. There was nothing more to say. They had cried and cried the weeks before, a tidal wave of sorrow engulfing them and their whole world. It seemed smaller, the world and as if on an empty beach on the last day of Earth they peered into the future where they saw a blank hole filling with darkness.

“It’ll be alright dear.”

“We’ll make do and carry on.”

“She would have wanted that for us. To carry on.”

But the thought of carrying on was to each of them secretly an impossible task. It would have been easier to count the atoms of all the tears they’d shed since the man from the Ministry had knocked on the door.

“She’s never coming home dear.”

They squeezed each other’s hands tighter and let their heads look down at the table cloth decorated with chicks and ducklings. It was a week before Easter.

The egg they had found under the hazel began to move.

It was almost imperceptible at first, a faint vibration in the shell that tapped the table like a polygraph.

The vibrations increased until the egg actually began to roll a little, knocking into the jam jar with a clink, then returning to its original spot.

“That’s funny dear.”

“I know.”

The old pair were transfixed by the movements. The egg wobbled and shook for an age until finally there was an audible but gentle crack.

The crack became bigger and the egg split jaggedly into two halves.

From within a small creature popped out onto the cork mat and “peeped”.

It was the most beautiful thing that the pair had ever seen in their entire lives, a fragile being emitting light and colour from its every pore. It flopped around awhile until, mustering some unseen force, it stood up and looked at them.

“Oh my! Its her, its our lovely girl, she’s come back!”

“Yes dear, she has!”

The ancient couple cried and laughed as the little hatchling hopped around the breakfast things bumping into the empty egg cup, where it jumped up and landed in its neat striped bowl. It peered from over the rim and seemed to smile.

“Our baby!”

The two were overjoyed beyond comprehension. It was a miracle where no miracle could exist. A sticking-together of a shattered daughter blown to bits just before Easter. A world re-made.

Their hearts filled with a million memories of family life like wine: becoming parents, tending her needs, playing in the garden by the hazel, looking for the bunny, her first day at school, her prom, her eighteenth limo and her passing out tall and proud.

They shut their eyes to recall it all and never opened them again.

A small chick jumped across the tablecloth, pecked at their joined hands and flew away through the open kitchen window into the blue day beyond.

DEGRA

Degra was the whore of Carpathia.

A  concubine of great repute to whom the Lords of Wallachia would flock. A lady of the shadows offering succour in the darkness of the warring hills.

From a tender age she had been broken by the barons; a coveted thing but a thing no less. Like a baby's rattle she was passed between the great houses guarding the slopes of kingdoms as the borders shook with the clamour of war.

Battles were won before bedding her; treaties were signed in blood with Degra looking on: siblings were slaughtered as she dressed: mistresses were forgotten with the promise of her attendance. Degra witnessed the vigorous throat of a nation slit many times as she bore the heft of vicious Kings and sprang their ill-spent spawn.

From the snowed peaks of the Tatra to the mighty Urals her name made nobles scheme to bed her, but it was in the House of the Dragon were her heart turned black. Dracul was the war lord feared by others, his passion for impaling his enemies making his name a byword for barbarism. Not yet the blood devil he would become, his lust for spilling blood knew no limits. He sticked his foes, staked his rivals, burnt his staff and ate his friends.

Upon Degra's tender body he reeked injury after injury as he tested the limits of her mortality. Brutal nights with this sexed beast were jeweled with punches, kicks, bites, burns, pricks, scalping and flaying. Degra's blood was also nightly drawn into small flasks as the Count began his heinous journey towards vampirism and its curse upon the world.

But Degra was truly defiled by others. Unbeknown to the cheating Count, once secreted every morning as he left for the border wars, Degra was captured and imprisoned in the ossuary of Dracul. In the baleful company of his jilted wives, the whore came to know the meaning of violation and the bloody pangs of their bitter scorn.

The cruel and jealous brides of the Impaler slaked their thirst for pain on the young flesh of the girl every day among the bones of the dead and her screams could be heard echoing along the valley sides. Farmers cowered in their byres and remained hidden lest they illicit the foul attention of the Dragon House.

Defiled and desolate, punctured and bled, Degra withdrew into the furthest shores of her being, a place so deep and dark that thoughts dared not form. Only hatred had a home, a seething maelstrom of hostility threatening to suck in her very soul. She was barely human anymore.

The terrible atrocities wrought upon her body continued as the Dragon's brides plumbed the depths of depravity with iron and spike. The autumnal fog settled on the kingdoms' foothills and the barons of Carpathia slowly forgot about Degra and her silenced screams.

The helpless girl's hatred of the heinous brides grew and blossomed and became a lush charred garden in the grounds of Wrath. She tended its black fauna with patience and tenderness and it billowed like the yawning beds of her suitors' mansions, where her bastard babies slept in lonely graves. Their dead dreams deepened like cysts on which they suckled and on the day of her demise Degra's true hatred was born.

It was the soulless season: winter in the lightless hills was a dire miasma of hoar and hail and the Dragon's brides were vexed by the biting cold as they ran down the long steps to the ossuary. Degra lay chained to the wall.

"So you kept our men warm on days such as this did you, whore of the slopes!" screamed the brides as they slapped the girl's listless face.

"You thought you could usurp us and dessicate our loins sad whore, but it is we who shall unseat you. It is we who shall split the cuckoo and rid the hills of your irksome ova forever. Prepare to die slowly, Harlot!"

The mean Contessas chose the symbol of the House and their husband's fearful moniker .as inspiration for Degra's doom, the long and dreadful sharpened stake.

For many agonised days and nights Degra suffered the patient curette of impalement, a twisted final coupling as the brides howled with pleasure.

When the point eventually passed through and her lifeblood spilled over, Degra's eyes were wide with loathing for the savages before her. A power began. A force forged in sadism and charged with vengeance. It gathered in Degra like a cyclone.

She thought of her unwanted bairns and smiled, her blackened heart the engine of her growing wrath as she stood skewered and raised her arms like wings before the staring wives.

Degra summoned the last residues of her dying self and issued a scream so primal, so wretched that it extinguished the sconces lighting the crypt and spattered the red-hot embers from the iron brazier. She clasped the timber jutting from her loins and wrenched it down and free. A colossal veil of her precious life gushed over the now terrified women, a scarlet tide of scolding liquid dissolving their soft flesh, stripping it from their ribs, which fell clattering to the stone floor of the bone room.

Degra wilted to the ground and folded her wounded arms around her shoulders, a curled flowerhead spent from the carnage of her blood-eagle. She closed her eyes and sensed her changing soul departing as she at last died in the House of the Dragon.

She vowed her return and knew her children would wait for her in their graves.

Degra’s soul soared like a gigantic kite, billowing with hate, fanned by a thousand desecrations. Liberated by death, she was transformed into a harpie of unstoppable force.

Unsure of her ultimate destination Degra sheered the oozes of limbo until she settled on an endless plain of darkness. She landed like a terrible moth, an eater of light and she found herself on the outskirts of Hell.

She then sensed the ground rumbling beneath her feet. Stretching the capillaries of her colossal wings she arose to face an approaching horde; a dark battalion of demons sent by the dark thing to retrieve the infamous whore of Carpathia.

The demon at the head licked its red lips and drooled as it spied the shapely wench. Its phallus engorged and swelled to huge proportions as if it were straddling a field canon.

“You shall be taken to the Dark One harlot, but first I shall sample your delights myself” it hissed as it stroked its swelling member.

The other demons looked on with keen interest and grinned inanely as they too rubbed their pulsing cocks. Through glass sharp fangs they dribbled like idiots.

Degra remained unperturbed. She had witnessed enough savage lust on the mortal plane to not recognize it here in the Devil’s realm. But unlike her mortal self she had grown immeasurably stronger in the vault of Dracul and now passed on she had become a gargantuan siren, a devourer of beings, a raptor-like wraith of limitless power and the incarnation of vengeance.

The leering demon lurched with lecherous intent and lunged its phallic ram toward her lips. Degra grimaced with her eyes shut half-heartedly yelling ‘Nooooooooo!’ but then, she opened them and smiled, a huge smile exposing a dreadful array of countless teeth as sharp as dirks.

She bit the demon’s member clean off and ate it. Crunching, she then turned to face the remaining throng. They hesitated and their exhilaration wilted quickly. Degra rose in the foul air and extended her huge wings and took flight. Her mouth widened massively and she swooped to consume the now panicking demons, scooping them up by the hundred like a monstrous basking shark.

The black plain filled with the thick blood of the mangled imps and Degra ate her fill. She alighted upon an outcrop, outstretched her wings and issued a ground-shaking roar.

At first there was silence. Nothing stirred. But then a yellowy crimson glow appeared on the black horizon like a distant fire. It grew bigger and gradually a form emerged, a horned demon grasping a towering trident. Its cloven feet punched burning prints into the vile earth as it trod slowly towards Degra. Around it the flames swirled and the figure became huge as it neared the rock.

It was the Devil himself and he stood before, her a gigantic red-hot being of fire and sinew with eyes as jet as the endless night.

“You dare to kill my demons Whore!” he yelled as the plain shook with his might. He was the monarch here in this kingdom of misery, the fallen angel from a story older than time itself.

“I am Satan, Lucifer, Asteroth, Beelzebub: I am them allllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll”, he roared and slammed the shaft of his fork onto a steaming boulder, which split in half with a deafening crack.

The visitor slowly rose. She stretched out her enormous wings to their entire width and stood fully erect. Her massive mouth widened revealing her thousand fangs and she screamed across Hell:

“I am Degraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”

Satan was momentarily stunned by the force of her voice but rallied his vast frame and readied himself for battle clasping his giant trident, the three barbs pointing straight at Degra.

Degra hissed and flew into the rank air. She hovered in front of the Devil, a bird of prey. He lunged at her and she flew higher. He breathed fire at her wings but Degra was too fast. He cast crimson beams from his black eyes but she had grown immensely agile and spun around mid-air.

This monstrous fray continued for millennia, the foundation of Hell buckling under the strain.

After an age the ground around began to split and the trapped souls of the damned crawled out like lava.

“Look Devil. The slaves of your keep break free!” Degra laughed.

Satan turned to see it for himself and as he did Degra flew high and down, wrapping her huge wings around his lethal fork and his entire body while positioning her head just above. She opened her terrible mouth wide and her teeth glinted in the red glow of the startled demon. He looked up at her as her mouth descended upon his cranium. She smiled and engulfed his entire head before biting it off at the neck. She chewed.

Satan’s towering body fell to the ground upon which thousands of liberated spirits teemed like ants and began to feed on the red meat.

Degra cleaned her teeth and ascended high into the fell sky.

“Hell is no more, the Devil is vanquished and I set you all free!” she boomed before rising through the fly-ridden mists towards the mortal plain. She entered it where once she had dwelled two thousand years before to search for the House of the Dragon.

She found it empty, a decrepit rampart crawling with spiders and rats. Hurling them to one side she smashed her wings through the floor to reveal the ossuary, the setting of her slow immolation centuries ago. She was struck by the five coffins lying in a circle. Degra cast aside a lid and plucked out a corpse donned in white clutching a dead rat, its blood streaming from her cracked mouth. Immediately she recognized it as the shriveled body of one of Dracul’s brides, who had for so long tormented and defiled her.

The veiled corpse opened her rheumy eyes and gazed with disbelief at the wraith clutching her throat.

“Yes, Bride, it is I, Degra, returned to show my respects. Where is your master my dearest?” she asked tightening her grip.

“D- D- Degra, my Master is far away. In London Town. But he will n- never see you Whore. He has other t-tastes now!” croaked the bride.

“Thank you. I feel sure he will see me again my dear but alas you will not. For all those days and night’s I spent in your noble company I give you a parting gift”

Degra squeezed her talons harder and the chicken neck gave, the lank haired head dropping to the stone floor. She repeated this four more times and crushing the fanged heads beneath her massive feet she felt a twinge of contentment as her past captors were extinguished forever.

One more task remained before she left these hills, to reclaim her squandered children sleeping in the middens of long dead Kings. From high she called them to her.

From every corner of the dark valleys gentle rustlings could be heard as earth and scrub was pushed aside by tiny hands. The exhumed babies opened their eyes and cried as they saw their mother. Degra clapped her wings together and the babes swam through the air toward her, her dead progeny, defiled for being born as she was. She took them all beneath her wings and screamed her delight to a waiting world of the future.

Sweeping away from the fastness of Carpathia, the land of their desecration, she glided on the thermals of jagged peaks and at length reached London, where Degra saw the streets teeming with the seeming dead sleeping in shadows. She recognized that same fetid blood lust on their faces as that of the Dragon’s barren brides.

What had happened here? Was it now a world full of foul vampires?

Degra flew west towards the plains to rest her wings a while.

The city meantime bled and scabbed: slicks of evil pooled like oil, thick and crude.

In a modern world rid of Satan the undead had dominion now.

A lack of any faith was on the rise. Humanity hid. The undead swelled.

He, the Dark One, had laid his cables well since his violent nights with Degra. They had stretched into this future word.

For a thousand years they had riddled the globe; the capillaries of his thirst. Blood welled up, throats were slit, eyes were gouged, hearts were ripped from ribs. Blood overflowed in goblets.

Dracul waded through it all, waist-deep in flesh and bone. A sea of wounded tissues. He gazed at the distant plumes of fires and warfare and kicked motes of human dust across the streets.

But he was bored. The world was his. Satan had skived like a schoolboy. Bunked over the wall. Who gave a fuck where he went.

This, the Year of Our Absent Lord, 2084, was it. He was majestic. The Devil by proxy.

The vampire king dipped an acidic finger in the grue. Sssssssss.

He flew to his home of late, an ancient white square tower nestling among the steel and glass blocks of the city where he walked and pondered. It reminded him of his Carpathian home an age ago.

He sat, a wolf-bat, tedium swallowing him in a reverie of silence and echoes. He had ignited a pogrom of violence in the city's thronging streets and drank his fill there.

The Tower of London stood tall above the murderous mobs, its pale walls spattered with the crimson of incisions and slaughter. Its moat was a ring of blackened blood.

Over the coming year, the six ravens of the Tower were enslaved by him. He was the Ravenmaster.

He clipped their wings to keep them close, those five. The sixth, Drool, was unfettered to do the dark Lord's bidding. He was rewarded with biscuits dipped in blood, a treat denied the jealous five, who reminded Dracul of his wretched brides in his fortress long ago.

"Drool. Drool. Black as oil. The world is mine. My blood planet. But I am bereft. There is nothing left to turn. Nothing to infect. What can I do. Drool, what say you?" asked Dracul.

"Deepest darkest Lord of Decay, Master of the Blackest Ravens, there is a place that might allay your weariness with the world, a place that might entertain you, a place of .... worship," Drool croaked.

"Worship! Woooooorship! Whoooooo is worshipping whoooooo?" he bellowed, the Dragon, crawling down the wall.

"They worship a new one Master, humans, they have a new god," Drool whispered in his steaming ear.

"A NEW GOD!" yelled the creature on all fours. The raven stood on his back.

"Yes, Great Lord, there is an enclave, a gathering, a nest of believers, dug in like the fattening ticks on my scratty back. I know. I have seen it," crowed the raven oiling his long thick feathers.

"Where is this residue of sweet-necked bastards Drool. Where?"

"Silbery Master. Silbery Hill Hotel. A Guest House of this Faith below the green slopes."

"Take me there crow. Take me now!"

Drool grasped the thick mat on Dracul's back as he strode across the cracked land, batting away fawning sycophants with huge dog hands. They reached Silbery Hill at dusk. The Hotel nestled in its shadow like a blister.

"There Master, the hotel by the hill," Drool hissed, pointing with its wing. The vampire scratched his tattooed tongue and smiled.

"I love believers!" he chuckled, "such a vintage draught in dangerous casks!"

The monster and the crow reached the step both transforming into a travelling salesman with a large black sack.

Knock Knock Knock.

An nervous-looking woman opened the door and peered into the black night.

"Good Evening dear lady. Mister Quench at your service, purveyor of tooth picks for those who still retain the need of such simple things. May I " the businessman oozed.

"Good Evening Sir. I must ask you. Are you of the new Faith?" asked the woman.

"Agh yes madam. I am thirsty for it. You might say it has an infusing effect on me."

"Excellent. Excellent. Come in. Out of the darkness and rest a while."

"Thank you my dear."

The businessman-vampire entered the hotel and felt the first frisson of cautious excitement as he sensed the strong aura of belief within this house, a belief he would take great pleasure in destroying slowly and watch the residents' blood decant before his ancient gaze.

He was taken to his room for the night, where he caressed his raven Drool and smelled the Living in this house. He could not wait.

Dracul padded lightly out in the form of a jackal. Drool rode his back.

"I sense a gathering Master," whispered the raven., "In the chapel."

The jackal growled softly and ascending the staircase, nosed open a large teak door. Inside where candles lit by the hundred around the chapel, In the twilight Dracul could make out human forms, both large and small, sat side by side in wooden pews. At the altar stood a much bigger shape in the murk of the shadows. It had its back to the company.

The jackal and the raven loped up the central aisle to the head. As they passed each bench human eyes were upon him, the eyes of adults but also of very small babies. Babies with red eyes.

For the first time in an eon Dracul felt a twinge of fear run up his spine and his hackles rose. Drool squawked as a baby reached out for him.

Assuming his vampiric guise the Dark One stood before the figure at the altar. Slowly the figure turned and as it did huge wings unfolded and stretched out across the dark, their clawed tips illuminated by candlelight.

The winged figure raised its head and grinned at Dracul.

Recognition dawned on the face of the vampire and he tensed.

"The Whore of Carpathia!" he hissed, "Have you come back for more wench!"

"Count of the Dragon House, how I have waited for this moment, through eons of endless time, to meet you again for one more kiss!" replied Degra.

"Then come to me my dear," beseeched the Count.

Degra stepped forward smiling, her wing tips extinguishing candles.

"Babies!" she whispered at which the red eyed children rose and descended upon the raven Drool.

"Masterrrrrrrrrr!" it shrieked as they ate the entire bird, spitting out black down and returning to theor pews.

Dracul was enraged and assumed a huge wolf-bat form, growling and snarling, lunging for Degra with massive dagger-like fangs exposed, but she was too quick for him.

Wrapping her vast wings around the figure like leaves she widened her own mouth of knives. In this lethal embrace they stared at each other gnashing, fangs clashing like swords as each tried to bite the other. It was a monsters' kiss and Degra, cracking joints, opened wider still and took in the whole of the vampire's screaming face.

Suddenly the door exploded inwards and a roar reverberated around the chapel like a tidal wave.

"NOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Degra stopped and looked up to see a colossal black figure stoop into the room and stand fully erect at the entrance, its dark hooded head touching the high ceiling, its hands hidden within its long sable shroud. A thick yellow freezing mist emanated from it and percolated the room.

"I am Death and I command you to give Dracul to me!" the figure bellowed in a deep booming timbre.

"He is mine, Lord Death. His life is forfeit to me!" replied Degra holding onto her prey.

"He is Undead Lady Degra and the world bloats with his cursed un-men. I must bring an end to his loathsome reign. Only death will do for him and his web of puppets," boomed the figure, "I command you!"

The jaundiced fog swirled around Degra and, as if forming hands, began to pull her wings apart. 

"Babies!" she shrieked. 

Her progeny hopped off their seats and looked up at the shrouded giant, They flew up encircling his shroud and ripping into tatters. With supernatural speed, the children rent and ripped until Death was exposed as a gigantic skeleton towering over the assembly. 

He gathered the mist around him and sent it hurtling towards the babies, who were ensnared in its frozen eddies and held like stuffed animals.

"My baaaabieees!" wailed Degra and loosened her grip on Dracul.

The vampire hissed and champed facing his two adversaries, his appalling talons outstretched. 

Once Degra had accepted her offspring's demise she whirled round and glared at Death and then the Count.

Death stood still and waited.

Dracul moved first and leapt onto Death's back, his fanged maw broadening as he tried to bite the deity's neck-bone. With a dreadful screech, his vampire teeth actually punctured it and drew viscous black ichor from the wounds. Dracul drank and plied his curse upon the Reaper.

But far from harming the fogged figure, the dank fluid began to ossify the Count's veins and render him paralysed. His skin began to stretch and tear, his bones cracked and his organs liquified on top the chapel floor.

Dracul writhed in agony as his body dissolved in the cold river of Death's blood now coursing through him, an extinguishing tide of finality bringing certain doom to him and his millions of followers, all interconnected by his tendrils of evil.

As Death and Degra looked on, the dying Lord of Darkness smiled. His sentence was over and he could sleep the coming millennia in the company of his long lost brides. He glanced at his two opponents one last time as his flesh and blood were powdered, curling away in the bitter murk.

Degra turned to Death and stood silently staring into his skull. Slowly her wings receded and her form softened and reshaped into the beautiful woman she had been a thousand years before in the hills of her homeland before her degradation.

"Go Degra. Live. I have no need to take you yet. My monarchy is once more restored and the graves are massing now the Dragon is slain at last. I shall be busy. Go. And take your babies with you. One day, in a lifetime not yet spent, I will visit".

From the ice of the rafters drifted small forms crying for their mother like the lambs of Carpathia. Degra knelt to hold them all and, as Death departed, shed a mortal tear and gently mouthed the word 'Thankyou' to the sky.