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  The nuns drag her, foaming and vomiting rust, from the charnel cell, and drive her with scourges into the wilderness, chaining the gates in her wake with finality.

  One moment, the Jack of Hell is tangled up in lust with the meatless femurs, desiccated lard and fragrant, necrotic tendons of his beloved; the next, he is alone in his underground boudoir. His bellows of frustration and rage cause seismic waves across the countryside; the earth splits asunder, and the sanctified convent is engulfed forever within the belly of the Beast.

  VIII : DOGSTAR PACT

  Those with soft leather skin and fur entrails have little need of clothing.

  In orgasm, Philbin envisaged metamorphosis as a mosaic of spasms, whose leitmotif was an inverted, slit cross of rancid meat. This system of mutant flesh was dominated by a white sun face shooting bloody rays, dissolving as he ebbed into cataleptic sleep. These visions had begun with his wife's pregnancy.

  As the months progressed, she could no longer tolerate sexual intercourse. Philbin expended his energies on the land. One evening, his raven blue mastiff, Sodom, returned home from harvest with a dead dwarf clamped in its jaws. The prey was badly mutilated, neck bitten right through to the bone. Philbin was fascinated by the slick, glistering vertebrae on show; he cut out three of them, and carved them into dice.

  From the top of the dwarf's deformed oval skull he hewed a cup, and wiled away the long summer nights by casting his new tarot cubes against the shithouse door.

  On the eve of his daughter's birth, a whirlwind flared in the darkling haze of the North, inaugurating vertiginous insurrections against Nature. A netherworld pageant unfolded in rapid time.

  Mandragora sprouted from an unmarked grave; bees with human faces sprinkled pollen over the head of the slumbering Sodom. The dog collapsed into a violent, unstoppable bout of sneezing, its whole body convulsing, and died with dark blood foaming from its snout and penis.

  These tarns captured the image of the setting sun; in overwrought crepuscular arcades, cannibal scarecrows clashed. Ghost drums hammered in the bleak cornfields. No matter how many times Philbin cast his dice, they turned up triple six.

  A screaming breaks the spell; screaming that endures while Philbin runs across never ending fields to the farmhouse. It ceases, finally, just as he vaults the porch. Wading through stacks of new green corn, manure sacks and dog chewed harebones, he bursts into the gloom of his wife's bedroom.

  There is something wrong here. This should be a shrine of new life. A bright, joyous place.

  It says so in the Bible.

  But it is dark. So dark, and quiet. And it reeks not of life, but of death; something like an abattoir. There is even a carcass. A carcass that looks, in the wan light, ridiculously like his wife. Halved, lengthwise, from within.

  Halting sharply, Philbin skids on her cooling innards; falling flat at the feet of his newly born child.

  She stands at least a yard tall on the bed, with black hair clotted in afterbirth down to her knees, the opaque eyes of a shark, and shining, coral white skin. A length of steaming spinal cord is looped over one shoulder like a lariat. She is kneading her dead mother's dugs with both fists, gulping down the curdled cheese that comes squirting forth. In the flickering lamplight, her pelvis throws a canine shade.

  Between her open legs, glowering mutely scarlet, the cruciform vagina of the Beast.

  Horrorstruck, Philbin is aware only of a swelling drum beat without; then, the revving of chainsaws in the old barn, and a rising, high pitched babble. With a feral grimace, Coral White springs past him and is gone. Slipping in his wife's intestines, Philbin skates over to the window in time to see her vanish into the corn, flanked by a group of tiny, twisted saw bearers.

  Silence.

  The world did not turn. Philbin sat on his porch, staring at the negative sky, for months. Or was it years? He could not tell, nor did he care. The mists of Time were fermenting, slowly, in his occluded soul.

  Still silence. Not a sound, save for the ceaseless clicking of the dice in his fist. No birds sang, not a single leaf grew on the tortured trees. The bleached, infertile soil was nothing more than a sarcophagus for the sun.

  Finally, noise. The snapping of the brittle grey crops. Then the low sputter of motors ticking over, and gentle but off key singing. The first deformed heads, swathed in nauseous ricks of hair, emerged from the fields. More followed, and on their shoulders Philbin could see borne a huge, symmetrical cross. Lashed tightly to its beams, a naked, pale skinned girl with jet black tresses.

  Coral White.

  Older. Much taller. And unmistakeably, human. Philbin could see that her eyes, imploring him to reclaim her, were wide and limpid blue: her mother's eyes. He scanned her body. Although dark fur now covered her pubic region, it could not conceal the straight groove of her sex. Little caring by whatever magicks the stunted kidnappers had lifted her curse, he arose joyously to greet her. The procession ground to a halt.

  A club footed, chanting freak hobbled to the fore. The dwarfen king, nude save for a leather belt with pouches, his mad body all humpty and buttered with stumps, his scalp ejaculating wild ringlets of embalmed crabs. In his left hand, an oak wand. He flourished it once.

  The arid earth at his feet cracked open, grinning, and spat back the bones of old Sodom. They spun aloft, then formed a pentagram around him as they settled. His right hand beckoned Philbin into this arena, then fished around in the largest belt pouch. There, nestling in his hairy palm, a trinity of dice honed from a widow's backbone. Philbin at once understood the troll's intent. They were to play for possession of poor Coral White's soul.

  For hours they fling their bones, the winning and losing going back and forth. Dwarfs surround them, jeering and firing up their chainsaws when the king prevails, plunging into silent menace if Philbin regains the lead. The moon reaches its zenith; they stand even at the final throw. The dwarfen king casually flicks his wrist. The dice roll forth, and his minions erupt in a frenzy of guttural cheering, saw blades zig zagging through the smoky night air. Seventeen. Philbin needs the maximum score to win, and it has yet eluded him.

  Jiggling the dice in his skull cup, he tries to imagine the certitude of insects. The way the wolverine sniffs out gristle. The magnetism of cobras, the unerring swoop of blood drinking bats. He becomes entranced. The tarot cubes launch themselves of their own volition.

  Six. Six. And triple six.

  Without ado, the dwarfen king rises to his feet, shrugging his buckled shoulders, turns and limps away into the corn that begat him.

  Glumly, his entourage follows suit.

  Philbin is roused by a pathetic whining. He rushes over to Coral White, ripping away the braided reeds that bind her to the cross.

  For an instant, he sees his anamorphic reflection in two soulless, shark black mirrors, before the talons of the Beast tear off his face.

  His winning dice twinkle, once, in the moonlight.

  IX : THE TEARS TREE

  All around the Tears Tree, on top of a tumulus, Nightingale has excavated coprolites imprinted with codes of eternity.

  Now, breaking them open like bread rolls, he sits and scours their fireless interiors, imagining worlds within each petrified genetic strand. Hot hair halls, walls respirating, pulsating with fist sized anuses belonging to each and every species; blowing forth beasts of jurassic excrement studded with diamond hard persimmon seeds. Old, meatless dead throb and glow with lacrimal vitality. He can feel the torrid, feculent air in his lungs, the nauseous sway of the undulant pelts underfoot. Reflected in the pupils of a shell bearing weasel, his head resembles a black fur cactus, riddled with gaping red sores.

  The transformer transformed.

  A misanthrope since birth, when the delivering midwife proclaimed his left clavicle to display the contours of a shark eating dahlia, Nightingale spent his boyhood years attempting to change himself into animal shapes. One day crouching and snuffling in a baffled badger's set, the next racing crabs sideways across silty river beds, he
spent endless summers in vain pursuit of this miraculous conversion. In the cool of night he would retreat to his favourite hideaway, an ancient tree nurtured on the blood and bones from a burial mound for mediaeval rapists. There, reposing on a crest of obliterated mica, rubbing his shins together like a cicada or lowing like a moonstruck cow, he began to formulate revenge on Nature; unable to reform, he vowed to become corruptor.

  In later years, he progressed to collecting the droppings which he took to be the essence of each living creature. Bent on rearing new hybrids, he would perversely mould every sample into the form of another; sculpting rampant lion effigies from lizard dung, Siamese shrimp twins out of ammoniac bat cave deposits, ram worms, feathered trout, and dozens of other mythic twists. Sustained by tree faith, Nightingale instigated a secret garden beneath the boughs, interring his soft, fragrant models in shallow nurseries. Thereafter, his lonesome midnights were passed in tending this miniature bestiary; splashing the soil with his watery adolescent seed as he spied upon foxes mating in the bracken.

  Striving to promulgate this renegade zoology among his peers, he met with ridicule; he was also unlucky in love. Night after night he sought solace on the old unchanging hill, irrigating the tree and his buried creations with copious tears. Seasons came and went. One Spring evening, as he sobbed away, he became aware of a falsetto drone from above. He peered up into the shadowy branches; there, imprisoned in pendulous bright red fruits, were the yapping faces of every woman who had ever jilted him.

  Physicians came; Nightingale was incarcerated with his mind in evil ruins.

  Now, the asylums lie empty; the Tears Tree is once more blighted by the shadow of the mad gardener. Cross legged, rocking, mesmerised by the parched ordure between his fingertips, surrounded by his unearthed treasure trove.

  Fool's gold.

  Down in the piping fur bowels of his bestial microverse, Nightingale is a rank outsider, a virus; the Anti Tears risen to reclaim his bastard kingdom.

  Thigh deep in miscellaneous excreta, he is fast pursued by stinking, roaring monsters ridden by the broken necked skeletons of garrotted sex criminals; buffeted by careering microbes, elemental jellyfish hovering infernally throughout the recoiling labyrinth.

  Lurching into a caecum, he finds himself backed against a curtain of rotting belly pelt. Tubers of filth clutch at his ankles. Even as the hunters bear down upon him, Nightingale feels a corporeal revolt.

  Fruculent faeces coursing in his chill veins, internal organs bedraggled with whiskers; a sensation of evolutionary glimpses, clawprints in desert magma under motionless, cinnabar starscapes consecrated to transmigration: the fleeting, headlong plunge from Supernature's convulsive parapet.

  Finally, he achieves transformation, becoming a creature of pure rectal hair, pock marked with open sphincters. A reedy whistle escapes from one dribbling red hole; hyper spatial, anaesthetic: the scream of the Anti Tears. Now Nightingale knows what it means to pass through the eye of the needle, to exist only in dismal reveries of the pleated and the worm eaten; an abject aberration of jurassic evenings, disencoiled from all sense, an echo in his own compressed skull like extinct primaeval oceans heard in a beached conch.

  Photographed through a microscope, he might resemble a series of ectoplasmic faces on a spiral stairway, the ghost in a melted machine of his own devising; drowning stumps in a morass of fused desire. Denied the games of a doll, he has shrivelled to this: hatred.

  His scream doubles; the hybrids in the first rank shatter. Yet their skeletal riders topple into the sewer with jerking pelvises, missiles of penile bone skewering the whining invader, holding him fast with cruel coccyx arrowheads. Gripped by saline violence, beasts, bone men and bird headed butchers fall upon him; the corridor swollen with the muffled sound of osseous talons raking dense matted innards, polymorphous hooves drubbing face swathes.

  Leper wings flutter in the sugar and straw.

  The last keening of a ransacked head reverberates away; the casing of the Anti Tears resides in a thousand fragments, whirling on ribbons of spectral gelatine about the Tears Tree as it sinks its roots ever further into the tumulus, sucking dry the grimly ranting bones, and thence into the very core of the carelessly turning Earth.

  X : SUCCUBUS BLUES

  Circumcised beneath inauspicious astral fallout, Rex spent his youth tormented by hordes of laughing skin; as desolate in his bewitched and bastard garret as an alabaster foal in a coal black meadow.

  Convinced his cicatrices would preclude human love, he began to forge company beneath the floorboards. Soon, seven concubines of pure sodium reposed underfoot. Easter came. Rex peered through his skylight, seeking, as ever, a benign horoscopy; he still saw nothing but sobbing galactic eczema. Treachery. Rex felt acculted, overwhelmed by a conspiracy originating from cipher. He knelt before the ikon of his father: a canonised anti image within an ocean pink corona, decademons crucified like rats in the sun. Scalpel blades reared from the canvas; adulterous, sectarian, divining uneasy waters.

  His supplications were met by a retort of nails and splinters, while skin bubbled across the walls and ceiling. Rex was aware only of the simultaneous advent of his recurrent demons: on his right shoulder, Edgar van Gavou, robed in rhapsody, shining with pristine ectoplasm; to the left, Ragvon Cadella with his cruel plumage and rawhide, filigreed in yammering yarn and torn down hurly burly. Cadella bullied like a brute angel, the rainbow of tongues that streamered from his ill craw urging Rex to strap on the spurs of vengeance. He spoke of treaties between the fanged and the fingerless, depicted paternal fiends cavorting in marriage bands of prepuce. Gavou demurred.

  Shadows creased overhead. The mocking skin had lowered itself in night nooses, hauling the seven lovers from their exploded repository and dangling them in mid air; for they had no wings. Rex peered up at the shifting row of crevices he had lovingly chiselled between each pair of hard white thighs. They appeared to be expanding, contracting, warping; finally becoming letter shaped, spelling out NEMESIS in the fearful ozone.

  The concept fell to the right lobe of his brain, embedding itself with an unknown velocity which seeks and gives no quarter. With feral breath he blasted the parasites from each shoulder. Ragvon Cadella hovered, leering across the room. Rex followed the red tracks of his gaze; Edgar van Gavou, the pacific, was spitted on an excoriating moonbeam loosed from the sad, milky arc of some sidereal crossbow.

  His eyes were little more than white slime. Pitilessly, Rex scooped him up and drowned him in a whisky bottle. His years of indecision were at an end.

  Cadella had assumed a cubic fettle; his face was a kana for blood. Goitres opened and closed on his throat, signalling wordless proclamations. Drunken, Rex saw only the demon's vision of himself as avenger, captain of a gore drenched slut pack. He felt a flock of soft hands upon him. His concubines, fully fleshed, felonious.

  It was the Easter of Easters.

  Sloughed from an unnamed satellite of skin, the beast with eight backs is at large: Bloodboy Rex and his seven whores. Their purpose, their method, an incomprehensible puzzle whose windings attune uniquely to Bloodboy's caprice.

  Each nightslide brings another consummation in the unbroken purple of their stifling, ileac honeymoon; another trophy culled and delivered to the altar. Surgeons, priests, parents of either sex; fists unclamped from sodium lips and manacled to cast iron operating tables.

  Bloodboy toils away without pause, performing ragas of resection and amputation, declaiming his sutural sonnets; the spoor of his needles and knives weaving an irreconcilable tapestry, a scar panoramic in which he sees vindication in rushes, impressions of a viscous period between dog and wolf. Society has misplaced one of its incarcerated gods; from a face inferno, fragmented sapphire discloses its stark thanage: in the very eye of a triangular storm, two young girls peel back the skin from their breast bones. Inside, the night. A star vortex, airless, icy. Their ribs comprise the bars of a prison cell; there are people living, breathing, inside granite blocks thick with lichen. A
high window is paned with stolen mirrors which reflect the faces in the floor. Canines range from corner to corner, devouring each others' excrement, dreaming of pink tinged eclipses. Black Mass. The cannibal feast commences behind livid satin.

  Before long, the titbits and scraps of discarded flesh have grown into an immense, unbreachable monument, ringed in ravished cumulus, imprinting its horrible shadow across the Earth like four flies on grey velvet; a god sized phallus that threatens to fecundate the Sun.

  Stranded at the tip of its colossal glans sits Ragvon Cadella, twittering; melting.

  XI : SYPHILIS UNBOUND

  Foretelling the future by chancre configurations on his glans penis, Galpin was able to intercept information exchanges in the world of weeds.

  A velvet cropper in latex, princess elect of the nests, was riding her sunflower meridian: Zillah, oozing like the opium that clogged the rattles on her cockerel claw cunt keep; star semen oiling a house of cancer. Galloping through portals of pensive beetle forceps came her fox embryo outriders, flanked by surfer ants on gossamer discs that spun in opposition to the sun. Behind them, weasels hobbling under the burden of cardiac warts, fatted ticks in zombie flesh and ambulant shapes of sheer gonorrhoea; a storming, merciless troupe that drank in lifestuffs like wild fire, while Zillah hunted down her albino quarry.

  Ahead lies Galpin, king for a day in a realm of capering plums, whey face flapping like barleycorn drapes punched through the pectorals of glory. Crowned in cyclamen and trumpets of Dragon's Pizzle, hidden amongst fish eyed wheat sheaves blessed by the miracle of atrocities, he fiddles with his mule masked, mummified hagstones.

  They are as impotent as a noonday sun that dribbles after midnight.