r/vampires • u/LOWMAN11-38 • 1h ago
Books, movies, series and such The Fangs of Dracula XX
The addict lie in the den, surrounded by plumes and clouds of smoke. Slovenly strewn upon the earthen floor like a haphazard scarf or other piece of frivolous accoutrement carelessly discarded. Empty with a hungering ending need like self-mutilation. Lost. Sleek with tacky sweat, woozy eyed. Vacant eyes that might be blind or might be staring into the coronal star center of the universe. Gazing into the inflamed and angry face of an Old Testament blood-drinking God.
Red. God has a red face in the eyes of the addict.
And It is terrible.
And He is terrifying.
The addict is locked inside but he does not care. He wants to be here. Lost and indolent and hypnagogic. Nothing is asked of him and he can constantly feed his appetites at his will, though there is only one hunger now that matters, and matters alone. All other hungers and needs have diminished in its wake.
In the smoke. Faces.
Faces of those that might've been and the weary ones of those that have tried and tired and eventually gave in, eventually died, all of them danced disembodied and veiled/shrouded in the manmade cloud of smoke, the manmade mist all around and above and filling the small hot room with white life, with white death. And then in the room of smoke, heavy and pungent and oily with drug, the faces of his heart and life's loss changed …
They became wretched and stretched as they pulled and broke apart, in swirls … in illogical rending tears … they became leering and animal and horned: they became demon faces. Chinese Demon Faces with reptile and feline features the color of leprosy and riddled with spiny whiskers, they are filling the smoke and they are filling the room and they are living inside him with every inhale… with every pull…
He brings the pipe to his chapped and cracked dry lips, the flame of a candle follows next, his atrophied and trembling arms can barely manage the effort. He sucks and pulls and the flicker of flame dances into the bowl of the pipe and burns it's precious flowers.
He sucks and the Chinese Demon Faces fill him and the pain is subsided. He no longer really cares. The faces inside him leer at the diminished surroundings of the broken and wasting addicted man's inner workings and they are glad.
They are rejoicing together as legion in the fleshscape ruination of the dying man, the addict. The special private hell that has been made for this thin and decomposing soured man, this thing of fetid smells and carelessness and spoiled living meat. This victim of himself and this victim of them, he is theirs.
He is ours…
They rejoice in the blood and the opiate flames of his insides. As dominators.
As conquerors welcomed.
…
Tulpa. That was what he had suspected at first. That the boy was just addled and projecting thought-form energies into creatured existence, blasphemous life.
But he'd seen. And he'd observed. It was no tulpa. The young man had a demon infestation of the mind and heart. He'd inquired thus: –
“How did he come into contact with the unclean entity?”
And was given a gypsy answer.
“In pig transport."
He'd nodded then as he nodded now, to himself. Alone. Preparing for the rite. He held his black bible and stole and rosary beads with dangling ornate crucifix along the end of its polished length. He prayed over all of them now. Silently. In whispers with his heavy lidded eyes shut. He is in palaver with the Almighty and does not wish for his eyes to behold any kind of distraction. He learned this kind of concentration not in the parish, not in Rome but in Tibet with the bald little men that could break arrows and spears with their bare stretched out and offered throats, the wrinkled little monks of the eastern mountain temples that fasted and meditated for hours and days on end.
He focused now … the Lord …. His Light.
The Light.
He'd been fasting as well. Quickening his mind as he purged and emptied his guts and bowels and blood for the eldritchian old white flame and light to come in and fill the empty human spaces.
He held the fire in his mind as he listened closely for the wisdom of God's words. Latin rapid fire sketched itself across his old and yellowed teeth and the aged purse of his pale lips in ancient and arcane staccato. He might've been a madman alone in his hut with his ambling words … run-on gibberish noise that could be madness or could be imbecilic.
Or could be loaded with power. Living and talismanic
A beat – he went on, praying.
A beat.
He rose.
He went to the door of his small hut of mud brick and straw, it smelled of horses and goats, always bestial, he pushed the slab of dried wood open and went out.
The gypsies were waiting for him.
…
They led him to the place and he felt it in his heart as they made dauntless their approach, this is where the Lord thus bades me to be …
and here it is that I will then play.
The man of the cloth, the priest stood before the den of woe. The shack of hate. It was silent for now.
They only paused a moment, together as a group, before he alone went forward and threw the bar at the entrance to the dust and then threw the door open itself. A waft of smoke, belched and bellowed forth in a massive dragon’s breath of cloud. In hypnosis swirls and raptural licking rolls, pleasured curls curling into themselves with self satisfaction like the toes of lovers beneath the sheets and in the grip of the heat and animal moment, they licked and tongued forth like beckoning phantom appendages made from heavy mist or salted coastal fog of far off long forgotten dark marinas.
The door was shut behind the priest and some of the gypsies put the fallen bar back into its place, the slots across the door, bolting it shut.
…
Inside the priest stood at the throat of meager doorway and there was barely any sun in there as he gazed down at the lost member of the flock, his charge.
The addict spoke without even looking at him.
“Go away, father, you are not wanted here, you are not needed here, you've been replaced. You see… nobody cares, certainly not I, for the pulpit blatherings and the two-faced codswallop you and your ilk prattle forth and try to make us swallow… You don't matter here anymore and neither does He, He-”
The priest had been silent at first. Allowing the thing to carry on. But then all at once he came forward, cross aloft and out like a sword and shield all in one with a roar, a command.
“You'll not speak! Till you speak to give me your name, foul thing! though I know it now already, I will make you give me your name! Over and over and over, crawling one! slave! Before the Lord God and I , you will say it! You will give me your name! – the notes and sour sounds that make your wretched title! ”
The thing on the floor recoiled and shrieked as if burned or sharply pierced.
And all at once the cross in the hand of the man of the cloth began to glow white with beyond ancient phosphorescent flame…
Old Testament. And beyond. A God beyond Jehovah or Yhwh lived in that light, in that primordial starfire flame.
The thing on the floor drew tighter and tighter into itself in a fetal ball, pained. Eyes clenched shut as if hoping to cage out the reality world of ripping agony. The shrieks became screeching abominated things. Inhuman sounds.
Their wretched cacophony began to fill the small place and the faces in the smoke began to scowl and gnash their sharp teeth. Hissing serpent tongues that forked at the ends in devil signs.
The priest began to speak.
His voice was thunder: – “Lord, I am Your arm and instrument and through me I will carry out Thine divine will and judgment. I beseech Thee O’Lord, grant me Thy Might to cast this wretched thing from Your sacred child and cherished flock, this foul thing bred of the fell ones cast down! – cast this one out and back down hence!”
The thing in the dirt bolted to a beast’s straddle on all fours from its twisted flexing writhing contrivance. It began to wretch. Violently heaving as if trying to gag and cough up something large and thick that's lodged itself in the throat.
“Send it back! Cast it back down! Get thee gone! and get behind me demon!"
The features of the thing began to grow and distort. Ears grew elfin, the face and nose stretched and snouted out as the rest of the features ballooned and swined into piggish hog like distortions of perspiring and angry flesh. Something was rippling beneath and bubbling to the surface.
The thing in stolen manshape howled, in a voice unnatural and not at all the young addict's own. It howled in failed contest and agonized relinquishment.
"I am Papaver Somniferum! Papaver Somniferum! Papaver Somniferum! I milk manblood into Dionysian wine for all time! always! I am trespass… I am interloper of the sowling manflesh, the meat that was made and drawn from the dirt!"
“Lord God, this young man is possessed by a demon and that demon's name is: OPIUM! – cast this thing out from this young blood!"
A black spew, like ebon/green tar, began to retch out of the swine throat and mouth of the convulsing addict's hog-swelled face. It began to collect in a pool in the dirt.
The priest continued the rite, finished of his recitations and prayers with own embellishments and arcane strange sounds, cabalistic, Solomonic-witchcraft all but forgotten but those wild few left of his faithful brothers …
… taught to him in the dark, far off. By those strange and of painted face.
For this priest was known in these lands by a dangerous name, for he was one of the cloth that feared no craft nor any dark or necromantic art, no forbidden knowledge was dread to him or his heart. God's renegade and sullied footsoldier. He was the heretic. And he was a blasphemer and a savior both in these lands, these dark and narrow parts.
The addict emptied himself. The pool of viscous filth was rather large now. A mini drowning pool of soul dredged cess. He collapsed beside the black vomitus, unconscious and bathed in a slick sheen of cooling sweat.
It danced and shifted like black diamond mercury there in the dirt, unruly lively angry stygian thick liquid. Beside its lost victim. Wanting back in, to retrieve its lost home and host.
The priest could feel the baleful hatred pouring off the foul collection writhing there in the dirt in a spew. It was aimed at the boy but it was also aimed at him. Wanting him dead. Maimed. Enslaved. In flames…
you'll not have me, dirt.
He walked over to the vile puddle. He said one last prayer over the bile, poured salt – which bubbled and frothed like the mineral does to the flesh of a slug on the putrid surface, he lit a match and dropped it.
The foul thing screamed as it caught. It went up easily in a choke of green smoke and red flames.
The face in those flames, that smoke …
he'd seen many before like it.
He crossed himself. Thanked the Lord. And concluded the rite.
…
He gave the knock, as rehearsed. They called out for the password at the door and he gave it to them. They released the bar. And the priest alone came out as he alone had went in. The smoke was gone.
Nothing crawled out after him. No dragon's breath to be made witnessed to or had.
…
The gypsies had gone in and retrieved the boy. They took him into immediate hospice care. But he was stable. And his health would return in time. The pagan caravan of worldly travelers thanked him copiously. With food and wine. He took both generously. And he departed their company when they came to their fork in the road and their paths were shared no longer.
The gypsy caravan went south. Playing music and singing and waving the priest goodbye as their many mule drawn carts went down the beaten track, sidelined by horses at a trot and some with riders astride that tailed at the back. And these were the last that he saw of them as they too waved him off.
He waved back. Then sat astride his donkey a moment in the path. The fading music of guitars and accordions and tambourines and rich voices faded and faded till it too was gone, the last phantom trace of them heard but not seen was swallowed by the vastness and great distance of the wild now all around.
He turned and continued down his own road. Towards the mountains. The dreams were telling him something was there, some spell. Something amiss.
The Carpathian Mountains called the priest and with them towering in the distance he set forth towards them at a steady trudge. Knowing more and more and growing more and more certain as he made his approach, that doom was alive and weaving some wicked magik, some terrible blood fueled chaos spell in those rocks.
The dreams and the Lord told him so, showed his dreaming eyes and filled his praying thought.
He tried to keep his head down as he made his slow approach. But he found his eyes kept drifting up to gaze at their opulent jagged knifing spire formation, aiming to stab and rupture the heavens, the velvet dark blue of the night sky. Darkening now into a more true curtain of night.
Darkness fell. The priest stopped and made camp in the road.
…
The fire glowed in the night.
The solitary campfire and bedroll and man sat alone in the dark. The ass tied off to a skeletal hand of a tree sprouted and dead from starving black dried earth. The priest was alone with his thoughts… prayers … musings of the Word and scripture and philosophy … it was as any night for he, the strange heretic of the road. Until it wasn't.
The night was suddenly filled. And he was no longer alone. There was a heavy maniacal presence, heavy and seething wet with red rage and unreasoning anger. Terrible and felt. He didn't move but sat by the orange bathing glow of campfire, his island of precious firelight that couldn't hope to penetrate the dark. He sat and listened. The ass grew restless.
Movement. But not with feet. Rather something swimming vague and undefined in the great expanse and sea of stygian dark shadow. Something large. Something that could swallow him whole or tear him apart with effortless gesture. Something that hated him and all of man and woman and child, all of the living creatures on this island earth that are precious and dear to the Heart of God on high, above. The Lord of the Storm in the sky that was far away from all of this. The pain and conjured filth.
He held steadfast as the large thing of hate swam in the nightscape of black all around. In a circle. Predatorial and closing in. Hoping and sensing out and tasting for weakness in the night. His weakness.
It might know him or why he was here and hate him for it, deeply. A complete being of elemental rage distorted alchemical by large and dark unnatural vulpine-felt forces.
He bothered not with the cross this time that hung from his neck and dangled in the wild night and darkled with a strange glow in the cast of the campfire glamour. He forked out the sign of the Evil Eye into the night…
He felt something growl with simmering livid violence out there in the swallowing black. The vibrations felt, palsied and tremored his running blood and weary old bones. He felt cold and as if suddenly stabbed with ice.
Impaled.
He muttered words then that Solomon had known, and taught. Passed down. Shared. Words that bent demons and demon will to shatter or subjugate as dominated slave.
The dark hissed back. Lurid sound. Full of hate. And whispers.
It wanted to pounce.
“Come forth, in yielded flesh on this physical plain…” the priest said, to the dark with his raised and daggering hand forked out in the evil sign, witchery sigil.
And then the dark did as it was told. Ensnared, the unwieldy angry shape out there did as it was commanded.
And in Lilith-shape it arose, she came forth.
Naked. Bare and smooth as if bathed and massaged with olive oils, round milk globe breasts caught the firelight with their smooth and deliciously rounded oiled sheen, delicate sensuous body with a generous mouth and curves. Her hair was shock white. Her eyes glowed in place of the moon, eclipsing the meager cast of his small fire.
She approached. Her smile was a murderer's lie and her arms were outstretched and open.
She of the dark came to his bed. The priest looked up into the elfin beauty of her forged youth and glow. He spoke darkly. Callous. Addressing the enemy in no uncertain terms.
“Come down and join me in my humble bed, you will give me the secrets you hold as I know you as a man knows a woman, another …”
She cooed and moaned in response and the sound was both sensual and wounded. In pain and in need yet woeful and on the precipice of ruin.
She came down to him and he stripped off his robes.
They didn't bother with the blanket folds as they consummated their act. They performed the rite out and in the open in the wild of the dark and their spot in the open road. They grunted and heaved into each other, matching each other for bestial sound and movement and purchase. Trading curses and fluids and secrets…
She spat his name – !heretic!
!Foul priest! Fouled and fouling yourself now, you'll die and be ours, ours forever! and we'll rape and make you dance amidst the fire and endless torture, we'll have you, at the end! in the Inferno! in the flames! In the endless sulphur sea! The flames! You can fuck me now, priest! but in the end you will suffer eternal in our lake of fire, Our Flames! …!
But even as she roared his mind was filled with the unearthly gift of her images.
Prophecy… information was given.
They fucked in the occult dark and he saw in his mind’s eye: –
There is an end to the world. A physical one. A border. A barrier hard to reach or even near. A place completely devoid of natural human life, of any living human existence. They are woods. Brown and dead. They are far away from the woods and forests of these lands or any other. They are paling with death, these frayed and tattered weathered edges. Nothing moves here. Nothing breathes. The apotheosis of lonely hell. The apothecary of sound and movement. The earth is yellow with unnatural color, for unearthly reasons. The trees yield to no blade, nor fire. They offer no comfort or rest in the shade. There is only one thing, one structure in this stagnant place under a light the color of pus.
A house. A cabin. Black. A lodge.
The black lodge is the only thing out here at the end of the world. Nothing is moving inside, like out in the dead yellow wild but that's wrong.
Something's wrong.
There's something in there. There's something in there, inside the black lodge. No one knows how it started. No one can say if folk traveled there in some fashion, in search of mad secrets and their power, or if they'd always resided in there… somehow. Nobody can say anything for certain of the parents. Of them there are only whispers, only dangerous rumors. The only thing anyone knows or can say for certain is that one day a child emerged.
A little girl.
A small girl with an intense and feline look in her pale face. A child with unnatural abilities and profane knowledge too large and grotesque for a little girl. A child with the dark glint of murder already so alive and well within the black flames of her young eyes.
A girl who grew to womanhood and traveled the world in a furious and ceaseless quest for knowledge. For power. The undead. Occult. Satanic. Felled Ones of farthest cosmic reach and starfire far-flung. The woman found servants along the way, she always did. Her power grew.
Then she came to the castle beyond the Borgo Pass in the Carpathian Mountains. And there she found what she'd been truly looking for …
The heart of the heretic was always heavy. Now it sank lower and despaired worse than it ever had before.
The vision thunderclapped! Collapsed.
And spat him back:
His hands were cupping her ample breasts when he came back to, more fully within himself. Now he squeezed them with real vile hateful relish. The white haired thing of the dark shrieked with harpy sound. Midnight owl screeching. Blood and milk shot from between his clenching and rending fingers, beginning to tear in as he continued to squeeze and claw. Her breasts were becoming a mutilated and slopping ruin in the cruelty of his hands.
He was screaming prayers at her. Up into her face in Latin. She tried to pull away but couldn't. He was an old man but he was lithe and strong with cords of sinew, ropey muscle.
He spat in her face and commanded her yieldship.
She gave it. And bathed him in unearthly fluids. The discharge of her loins steamed with inner heat expelled in the dark. Soaking him and the ground. The growing puddle hissed when it reached the campfire and a spurt of lavender flame issued forth in a small pillar. A face that was insectile and mammalian bastard commingled was in that brief flash and issue and then was gone as they continued to animal thrust in the dark. His hands continued to bite in and disappear into the mess of milk and blood and raw pink meat, ruined moonflesh.
And with a final rending tear, cords standing out on his neck, her eyes were brimming filled with spilling and steaming tears, he tore her breasts from her chest and she filled the night with a wolfen howl of slavery to pain and heartlessness.
She flew off of him and scrambled, retreating back into the dark with bellowed caterwauls of butchery’s ripping pain and anguished animal calls. There was nothing human in those sounds, as they fell back and away and faded into the nightscape of curtain pitch impenetrable and all around.
The priest wiped himself clean. Said a prayer. Checked his donkey. Then finally retired to slumber.
His sleep was deep and filled with dreams.
…
The next morning after packing up and setting out once more he came across desiccated remains. Something like a long thin starved wolf, or a hyena. Coyote perhaps. But he knew what they really were at once. The womanshape that had come out of the dark.
All that is left…
They were jackal remains. He spat upon them before he left. Crossed himself in his departure. Never looked back.
…
Symbols. He saw them everywhere on his way to the mountains. He began to encounter towns and small villages and everywhere he saw the mark of her upon them, the face of stolen earth, the souring soil of the ground. The faces and eyes and hearts of all of the children, women and men.
He asked what he could, inquiring where he could manage but all of them were afraid, filled with a small farmer's mortal terror of barely reckoned forces at work that bequeathed mischief and murder and black magic that made playthings of flesh and minds. They would hardly say a word to him about anything. He didn't blame them. He blessed them all in his salutations and added their faces to his nightly prayers.
He moved on. He left the towns behind.
…
The priest came to the circle of stones.
A terrible kind of place he recognized at once. He'd seen others like it before. In far off emerald lands.
The circle of stones, monolithic slabs of grey rock in the dread shape of the Druidic formation. A pattern and type of circle that could serve as a gate, or a nest, or a kind of inviting hunting ground for something unchained and set loose on our world.
The priest sang softly to himself. A little song of strange doggerel that he'd made himself.
“You fly like a demon, from station to station…”
He entered the circle.
And the place shook.
He finished the line: " … From Kether to Malkuth."
The thing that ruled the circle of stones made its presence known. inxnwn. The mangled filth of its voice filled his head as he sauntered in and the atmosphere itself threatened to throttle and implode.
!Get out, shaman! Get OUT! I will rip the bleeding mind from your eggshell skull and fuck the jelly before your dying eyes! Get the fuck ou-!
The cross came up. A bolt of white fire issued forth and struck the place. Blackening the mouth of earth and stones that the demon used to howl.
“Your name, elemental. Give it to me.”
And his mind once more filled with flames. An infernal epitaph made from shrieking wretched voices.
!I am the one that has come to man on the wings of dreams and sin, I am the Scribbler and I bring mad choir and I fill minds with sound! Man Woman Child the crawling elders and the lame … I spare none I distort discordant all!
Another flash of light, a bolt of silver fire bright and immaculate cut across the priest's vision and he had to shield his eyes. But the moment before his eyes shut and his hand flew up to protect his vision he caught a glimpse of an immense outline and shape: it resembled a giant sea creature he'd seen hauled aboard the deck of a traveling cargo vessel once, a manta ray. Gigantic. Wing span vast with long stabbing tail and strange devil face set pilot center of its efficient killing body.
This one had a large sex organ at the tip of its tail. Dripping. Excreting something foul and pungent. Steaming. And the vapors held pained faces telling him, no.
But then the flash of light was gone and when he looked again there was nothing there. Only smoldered earth amongst the quiet stones.
The circle was empty now.
For now. It may yet come again. Or something else …
He gave a prayer of thanks and then spat on the ground.
He patted his donkey and praised it for its steadfast behavior. Men mocked them as stupid animals and they may be so, but they were also brave creatures. Nowhere near as skittish as horses. Or men.
He tied up his ass, securing the rein to a stone, then he made camp for himself.
He poured a border of salt around the circle itself. Then he drew a hexagram in the dirt with a stick, David's Star. He fashioned a cross next and stuck into the head of the formation replacing and breaking its crown.
Then he made fire. Ate a humble meal of bread and cheese and wine. Gifts leftover from the gypsy folk. He smoked tobacco and watched the stars collect and reveal themselves in a bejeweled royal purple curtain above and on high. Heavens made of jewels made of starfire. Light burning above with an intensity that he could scarcely understand. He thought they where beautiful. They might be angel eyes, some of them, and he loved them.
He looked to the mountains next. Still in the distance. Growing larger as he drew nearer.
Even as he sat by his fire now not moving they seemed to grow larger yet…
Lord there is an evil alive in those rocks, there always has been. It's awakened yet again. Lord lend me your arm of strength. Give me the great courage and protect me from my own fears and the treachery of others, as you always have, Thank You Lord God. I know this is my mission. I shall not run.
I will not falter.
Amen.
He daggered the rocks with an intense and angry stare. Righteous anger. The mountain rock towered above but he looked down on it and its evil heart from on high nonetheless.
There was poison in those jagged formations, beyond the Borgo Pass where the wolves live. Cancer and abominated growth that must be excised.
Must be removed. Before it's too late.
He smoked by the fire till sleep came. His dreams were filled with symbols. Sigils. Strange words and spells. Ghastly shapes and faces.
Abhorrent designs ruling a decimated and titanic landscape. And he was alone with them.
TO BE CONTINUED…
