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  Like a girl bewitched in a doll's house, he investigates each room of the mansion, trailing mauve and copper cascades of drunken light visible only to the nightcrawling eye. Body heat. The heat from a repository of sacred fluids.

  Guttering, moth bound candles imbue the halls with violet irradiance. From the arched ceiling, avian skeleta rotate blithely on chains, expelling paroxysmatic silhouettes that suggest fugue induction.

  Set in the tiled floor, lapis lazuli circles sprinkled with burnt offerings and soma. Each wall bears portraits of strange beings. Shadowy, transitional creatures depicted in garish acts of sado masochism and narcissistic magick against backdrops of unchecked chaos. Envenomed images, that summon the young rider into their playground.

  While the sisters dream of fluids.

  Meredith licking punctured pomegranates in the gloom at the top of the stairs, peeping down at her guest like a wicked child; nothing visible save the opalescence of her teeth. Such sharp, pretty teeth, that will brook no mastication! She softly watches as her sister, whose own gums have borne no fruit, steals into the library. Feeling a fresh chill, young Smythe turns and sees her in an alcove, rippling like fire dressed in black. She gesticulates, fingering phallic avatars of tallow. Her gown is cut away about the lower belly, airing a damp triangle of hair subtly shifting by dint of infestation; a mesmeric undertow suggesting access to illimitable, concentric universes. Her red mouth, pouting and glistering with saliva, promises an eternity of hydraulic fellatio; begging for the elixir that only his loins can furnish.

  The crash of a pomegranate thaws the spell; pips spurting across tomes and cheekbones recall sylphs from silver trees, sipping widow's brew in the still of a hurricane. Teasing Smythe's transvestism, Meredith proffers a choker of pulsing diamonds as she descends.

  Diamonds to caress that hairless male throat.

  White throat filled with nectar.

  Sister to sister, autumnal stares clashing across the book lined arena, and betwixt, transfixed by slats of drilling, uncoloured light, trances in rays, their prey. Hours elapse. The foetus of new day kicking.

  With a giggle, Meredith relents. Her sister pounces on Smythe with a frightening embrace, peeling away his smock, her lips swallowing up his manhood. For minutes, all is still, silent but for her guzzling, his crescent whines. Finally, as his seed begins to spurt about the toothless gums, Meredith floats forward on a tide of laughter. In her slender grasp, a cobalt handled razor, replete with bevelled blade that seems to drink in all luminosity; broiling with fathomless, assassinated urges.

  Hissing up from floor level, its nihilistic edge slices cleanly through poor Smythe's genitals. While her sister falls back on her haunches, bloody and oblivious, still sucking and feeding from the severed organs, Meredith basks in the virile gore that jets from the traveller's groin.

  Soaked in the hot tide, blind in the final pall of night, the strands of her strange satiety conjure feline people with sad and probing tongues, mewling offspring of an eastern chant, as bells jingle from a caravan slewed across distant passes with a birthmark of campfires, raggedly outlining zones hermetic and abundant with fungal cells, mystery of milk, inside tight skin unable to comprehend the fatal law, treading pine needles into fragrant forest lairs where fortune and history, calyx of melancholy, are tossed like heads of dark curls to a moonbeam's whim, smoke over immutable snow, unearthing coins once minted from young black fury, that now despairs beyond frost gilded cupols of dead, and irretrievable, loss.

  Sunrise.

  Plumed white horses carry Meredith in her silk lined, emerald embossed silver casket, lid tight closed, across the yearning countryside, over the hills and far away.

  XVIII : THE COLOUR HELL

  Daybreak hangs from East to West like a triptych of electrocuted infants, an adumbration of the church that eats its young; Katrina bowls her last grapefruit across the frozen lake. Moths erupt, tangling in her shiny, treacherous hair.

  Her hair of the colour Hell.

  Then back along the snow packed bank, dragging on a rope behind her the rib cage of the boy named Healer. On the knobbled, blanched surface of this queer sleigh she has arranged a hexagram of leveret feet, stapled to the bone. The same lucky configuration which is branded between her breasts. In seared, ridged flesh.

  Flesh of the colour Hell.

  It was Healer who had first introduced Katrina to Williamson.

  Williamson, who claimed to have been roasted alive in a motorcycle crash six winters previously; six years before rising from the grave at the behest of Healer. By night, he would tell Katrina of the sights that befell him during those years, the young girl shivering at his tales of a shade hexarchy, hung with six edged beaten bronze talismans, that stalked the underworld; of their penchant for sowing grubs in furrows broiling with brain pulps, perpetuating the cacti whose fruit of decomposing insect protein they, and he, would devour; and of the subsequent apparitions of a fearful Jack and his servants, auto erogenous figures compiled of wriggling limbs, organs and unclean orifices.

  He told of some creatures with breasts instead of buttocks, and double jointed legs whose penile toes were forever lodged in the vaginas which ran down their faces like duelling scars; some with skulls jutting on stems from their armpits to chew at lactating nipples, while their enormous phallus projected from a vulva set between trembling thigh stumps to be encircled by a yard long, steaming yellow tongue; some with a double torso, the first uddered with multiple penises and the second with corresponding, masturbatory hands, horses' eyeballs set in the busy fingertips; some simply inside out, cockroaches mating on the exposed entrails while bone wombs teemed with polysexual fledglings cut from dead skin. Spectral, ever changing pigments in the dead biker's vision.

  His vision of the colour Hell.

  Soon, Katrina and Williamson were lovers. Bodies fusing under scaled epidermis as if by exchange of a million sticky oviducts, her tongue reaming volcanic sores, rectum bubbling over with ashen paste; psyches blasted by a scorching atomic wind, tidal atrophy, as they screamed the silent scream of changeling hexapods.

  Healer looked on from the lonely graveyard.

  Beneath the exfoliated caress of her burnt lover, Katrina came to comprehend the spectrum of the colour Hell. A spectrum diffracted from the last embers of hope as they cool on the funeral pyre, emitting from its core a host of phantom carriages that hurtle through osseous causeways, wheels ploughing liquid flesh, tearing open the arcades of the mind with a predatory, vesuvial thrust, until only the naked soul remains, pinned out on the shore of a primordial ocean that absorbs the sky, then becomes the sky, raining down untrammelled chaos; the stuff of a scope refusing to conform with gravity or the molecular, like lightning suspended in another dimension affording successive glimpses of foetuses and charnel visages, murder, stripes of metempsychosis, penetration, perfume and purulence, immolation and intelligence, defaecation, death by orgasm; eternity in a recurring microsecond.

  A spectrum devoid of warmth or doubt.

  A spectrum that Williamson was determined to wrest from its netherworld hexarchy and recreate above, with himself as sole high priest to the psychedelic Jack.

  Healer seldom saw Katrina thereafter. Her life was spent in Williamson's hovel. One night, peering through a gap in the corrugated tin roof, Healer saw why. She was flat on her back on a filthy cot, knees splayed. From between her legs, a greasy, thrashing tentacle tipped with human thumbs, and suckered its entire length with needle fanged mouths, was drawing its way into the world. Katrina's uterus, chirruping and plated with sentient chitin, had become a gateway for servile, transmigrant cephalopods.

  More than a dozen of the creatures were already in the shack, squirming in every nook, the floorboards carpeted with inflorescent genitalia and viscera; the air visibly stagnant, almost opaque, buoyant with miraculous, unglimpsed hues. And Williamson, doyen of this mutant microcosm, leering over its fawning inmates.

  Yet the Jack himself would not come forth.

  Mo
nths passed. Finally, Williamson resolved to beseech the Jack in person, to bestow an offering upon him, to placate him, entice him, persuade him that far greater pleasures lay in the realms above. He would have to die again and Healer would once more resurrect him.

  On the ritual night, Healer entered the graveyard solemnly, bearing the gift of a hefty woodcutter's axe across his slender shoulders.

  Carefully selecting the correct headstone, he cast his spells, recalling from the dead a freshly hanged killer. The psychopath rose before him with a head of worms; terrible breath began to filter through his macerated form. The stars went out for an instant. Then the killer snatched up the proffered axe in his wild hands, and with the aplomb of a master slaughterman he sheared off the top half of Healer's skull.

  While the boy's brain still sizzled in the snow, the crooning maniac gutted and jointed his sallow body. He then proceeded to reassemble it with metal cable, drag it down to the lake, and hang it from the nearest birch like a marionette. Hollowed feet scratched hoar frost, blood blossomed on snow like a first period; on the far bank, Williamson and Katrina finished up their last supper.

  Up in the branches, grinning liplessly, the psycho pulled the strings. Williamson was now peering over; he saw Healer wave, reassuringly, then plunged into the icy water, clutching the six pronged dildo he was to present to his beloved Jack.

  Williamson's bloated carcass still bobs beneath the ice, waiting for Healer to re unite it with the soul that rots in the underworld; eaten piece by piece, violently regurgitated, then eaten up again and again in a loop of vengeance by the Jack whose pets he has stolen – just as Healer's bones are slowly consumed and recycled by the hexapods of the forest, ensuring fertility for the centuries to come.

  Before Williamson's cracked, undead stare, a jubilant psychopath shoves his resurrected fist in and out of a young girl's throat, splitting open her frost bitten lips.

  Her lips of the colour Hell.

  XIX : DEMON'S SPICE

  In a jackal haven on the edge of town, wood bound, traced by spits of white gravel like the uloid rivulets that fork across a vulvite starway, and mutely guarded by bone meal sentries inset with solid gold, grinning teeth, sat Raine.

  Feeding, spiny fingered, from his cache of salted placentas; the creak of his tawny leather wings, finely brocaded with molluscs in motion, like wind around a gallows pole. Raine harboured death in every corpuscle. Yet verdant, exotic life sprang from wherever his fresh excrement fell; the rich, succulent pink stools coaxing growth even from slabs of the most unrepentant granite. Each growth, a part of his earthly garden. The garden of the white spice.

  Over the centuries, Raine had established a cyclic symbiosis with the residents of the vale. He granted them the right to harvest his once forbidden flowers, which they would grind in a great wooden mill to obtain the aphrodisiac spice for use in religious orgies. And they, instantly addicted, would soon give up even their own offspring in return for more supplies. Perched atop a leafless oak, Raine would often spy on these peasants as they disported in torchlit glades, nauseated at the spectacle of their sweating, heaving bodies, the arcs of spurting juices and distended orifices, the shrieks and snarls from faces masked in still bloody animal hides. But the results of these horrors made their licence worthwhile; the peasants' growing appetite for the spice was more than matched by a frenzied increase in copulation, and hence procreation, affording ever more infant delicacies for the demon's table. Raine disposed of the remains in secret mills of his own, providing the raw material for his coterie of smirking, gristley scarecrows. Meanwhile, his faecal sticks of the softest fat streaked baby meat, dropped during nocturnal prowls, fertilized ever expanding areas of woodland with the spice flowers.

  Yet now, a veil of tears has fallen across the land. The children of generations fed on the white spice, derived as it is from the fruits of accursed lard, have developed a minimal life expectancy. Born addicts, they suckle liquid spice from the breast; so advanced is their coronary sclerosis even at such a tender age, that they invariably perish in the cot from self induced cardiac arrest during frenzied bouts of masturbation or attempted incestuous sodomy; blue faced babes with chest high erections twitching in their cradle coffins. Their meat is unpalatable, soured by tainted adrenalin. The corpsegrinder grows hungry.

  Soon, the only mature townsfolk are senile, barren geriatrics; even the spice cannot induce virility, nor the flow of juices in dry hag loins. Yet still they come, scouring the woods for the scarcening blossoms, some on crutches, others raving in filthy wheelchairs. Easy prey; but not even Raine could digest their stringy, bitter seasoned flesh.

  Raine is starving. His meagre stools of greyish sludge are sterile, his fields fallen fallow. He is too weak to seek new pastures and townships. Forced to feed on his own private soldiers of ground bone and offal, he fears the onset of encephalopathy. The days spin past.

  Like a spider trapped in his own web, Raine lies inert, envisioned. Looming over him, he sees a feverish parade of revellers, necrophiles and nightcrawlers with painted faces and bodies, heavily jewelled, arrayed in gaudy silks and opulent sables; bearing salvers of esoteric drugs, powdered codices, the eggs of extinct flying lizards, organisms plucked from unknown ocean citadels; exalting on a precipice pocked with craters spewing lava and boiling rock, deep within a formidable volcano, on its edge, precariously, staring down into an infernal void where all dreams cease to exist.

  Winter comes.

  There is an undertone to the gusting of the glacial wind; just a murmur at first, like praying basalt, or perhaps the sussuration of carnivorous petals. Growing in volume and rapidity, it soon becomes more akin to the swipe of a gigantic pendulum – a manifestation, surely, of impending death. Raine's goatish eyes focus on the shadows that flicker across his lair, trace them back to their source on the stark skyline: the four sails of the old mill, untethered, stirred into action for the first time in decades.

  No doubt it was just the wind that blew them free, snapping the rotted ropes.

  No doubt.

  But then again, there is one other possibility. Perhaps the sails were freed by hand. Human hand. What if a secret herd of these prey animals still flourishes beneath the ruined township, glutted on covert arks of the holy anther?

  Drawing on his very last pools of dwindling energy, Raine lopes, half air borne, across fields of clean picked skeletons clutching pastel fossilized flowers, to the mill.

  In its lichen spotted basement, atop a drift of freshly ground spice, Raine espies two figures. They are evidently children, a boy and girl, emaciated, vagabond waifs no more than ten years old; escapees, judging by the hideous burns along their naked bodies, from the ovens of some cannibal overlord in a nearby valley. Possessed by the spice, they remain unaware of Raine as he peers down from the rafters.

  The boy is lying flat on his back, while the girl squats over him, her haunches in his face, sucking at the head of his over enlarged penis; he pulling her buttocks apart with his fingertips, thrusting his tongue deep into her rifled rectum. As ever, Raine is sickened by the sight, sound and stench of his cattle in sexual delirium. He sees the sears on the girl's back open up, lined with carious incisors; the boy's mane is bolt upright, knotted in electric runes. The pair seem halo'd by blazing giblets.

  Raine swoops. Weak, he lands awkwardly, kicking over a brazier of burning pitch. The carpet of seed husks ignites at once, engulfing all.

  For a day and a night they watched the old mill burn from neighbouring hillsides. Then the black, intoxicating smoke settled in the vales like fog, filling the lungs, precipitating a wild and month long debauch.

  A thick, oily soot, all that remained of the demon and his spice, seeped into soil and stone alike; into the gills of fish in fast flowing estuaries, into the fodder and bellies of beasts, and thence into the craw of migrant, coprophagic birds; into the wind, and the thunder, and into the very fibre of the planet.

  XX : ZODIAC BREATH

  In the time it takes for
one man to masturbate in his lonely bed, a million stars burn out; a million more are born.

  Rivers wend their way to sea, blades trace the curve of backbones under white and virgin skin.

  Tonight, we have no sense of crime.

  XXI : THIRD EYE BUTTERFLY

  The anus is the very mirror of the soul; its bitter tears more scalding and profound than the lamentations of blind angels in caves. The damned weep without shame and finger grave rims, they vaunt perdition, fattened grubs hatch in the pall of overarching spumes whose transient meniscus rankles with polyps that seem to emanate from the dark side of the sun. Wings kill. A man bewitched by a rectal hex perceives osculating buttocks in all he beholds – especially the full moon. The cold pallid stardust coating his morbid face consists of larvae puling horribly for release, yet he sees only the milky configuration of nirvana as his thirsting tongue laps the centre of gravity.

  Jana was a blonde witch. She had blonde magick in her nipples, and blonde death coiled in her sphincter like a diamond spined ouroboros. Her lips were loaded with thirteen centuries of sugar; her touch was gospel.

  Tonight, as every night, Jana's lambent haunches overhang the balcony of her cottage, latticed by the silhouette of a willow gauzed with titanic catkins that appear to palpate spasmodically, wickedly. A man is thrusting his face between her hairless dunes, seeking to drain the crater; he reaps only pupae which unhinge his craw, seeking brain heat. Every vein distends, his head resembling an inverted bee hive, green mucal mandalas billowing from torn nostrils, eyes devoured from within. Then it all comes apart at the seams, the blood already clotted, the skin as good as leather. In the broken brain pan writhes a massive mewling maggot, sour white, puffy; a pair of dwarfs cowled in sow hide scamper from the rear of the cottage, skewer the diabolic crysalis with meat hooks on long poles, hoist it up and hang it high in the witchy willow.