by Brant Danay
The footsteps began again. Chariah used his powers of echolocation to try and locate their creator, but found only vertigo in doing so. He peered down the ramp. The alcoves had gone pitch black. Chariah refocused his night-vision, but saw no one. He cast blood-red laser beams from his eyes like crimson searchlights all around. Again, he found nothing.
The voices began again, from far down the hall. This time, the speaker recited an entire dialogue.
"The Somniloquist calls you to die. The Somnambulist hungers for flesh. The Somniloquist will sing you a lullaby dirge while the Somnambulist digs your grave. Come to the Somniloquist. Come to the matriarch of death. I will give you the suicide you desire. Succumb to the Somnambulist. You know you wish to be eaten. You remember when you were dead. You want to be dead again."
There was silence for many moments, and then the Somniloquist began speaking again in broken fragments.
"Satan is a voyeur..."
Chariah followed the echoing words down the hallway
"Satan is ylem..."
The whispers came now from around the corner at the end of the corridor.
"Satan is a chronophiliac..."
Chariah burst into the foyer. There were five open doorways and a pentagram drawn in blood upon the ground. When the voice came again, it seemed as though it came from all five openings, and did not stop, but continued chanting in concentric unison, asking the same question repeatedly as it moved from doorway to doorway in a disorienting, spinning echo.
"Who..."
"Is..."
"Jh'..."
"A..."
"Vyraa???"
The Necrodelic froze as the voices continued to circle around him, until each doorway was chanting each of the five words simultaneously, like a mantra of death.
"Who is Jh'a'vyraa?" "Who is Jh'a'vyraa?" "Who is Jh'a'vyraa?" Who is Jh'a'vyraa?" "Who is Jh'a'vyraa?"
And then the steps began again, from the corridor behind him, at the base of the spiral rampway. Chariah turned around. The creature was ascending to the second story.
The words began to blur into strange rhythms and sounds around him.
"Jh'a'vyraa is who?" "Are you Jh'a'vyraa?" "Who are you?" "You are Jh'a'vyraa..." "...but you are no Jh'a'vyraa..."
Chariah gazed down the hallway he had just traversed. Another step rang like a gong in the darkness. As he started to head back the way he had come, he felt blood drip onto his face and gazed upwards.
Dangling from the ceiling was a hanging jungle of severed limbs. Arms and legs were arranged like plants in a topiary, a blossom of death, wreathed in blood that dripped like sap, like pollen, like crimson nectar. The Necrodelic wiped the blood from his face and trod back down the hall.
The steps echoed from all around, but when he reached the rampway, there was nothing there. The voices, too, had stopped. Chariah descended once more into the main hall, then took a different rampway to the second and third floors of the prism palace. Upon the third floor, the Necrodelic discovered the Oneirophage's drug gardens. Fields of black lotus, bushes full of peyote, towering stalks of opium poppies, streams of nepenthe, and orchards blooming and blossoming with black aphrodisiacs and soporifics the size of skulls. Chariah walked amongst the drug gardens, observing through the greenhouse walls and skylights the starlit darkness of outer space. More than the night skies of Grystiawa, he suspected, were flashing before his crimson eyes. The Necrodelic gazed out for a moment more, then exited the drug gardens into another five-way foyer.
Another garden of severed limbs dripped blood from above, spattering the pentagram below with ruby dewdrops. Chariah stood in the center of the pentagram, the stained glass gates of the drug gardens swinging shut behind him, and peered down each of the four hallways in turn. The voices began again, followed by the footsteps.
"Hell is a place inside you..."
Step...
"The end of time is a razor's edge..."
Echo...step...echo...
Chariah chose a hallway and ran down it at full speed. He could hear the voices growing closer now, and the footsteps moving faster behind him.
"The planes of existence copulate..."
The footsteps were loud heartbeats behind him now, the voices a mesmeric siren's song.
"Love is a slow death.."
Chariah could hear the voices, mere inches away. He ran charged through the darkness and into a sudden dream state, and then he was falling through space, the primordial fear of falling gripping him from within, the dizzying, terrifying sensation of one's astral body falling at light speed and striking the physical flesh like whiplash, over and over again, and then blackness, blindness, nothing.
*
Chariah awoke upon the floor of the Oneirophage's living art gallery. His senses spun in a few last centrifugal revolutions around the rim of his inner skull, then settled back into their resting places. The Necrodelic found himself amongst hundreds of paintings composed entirely of bodily fluids. The artwork was drawn and colored on canvases of skin and flesh with blood, tears, sperm, venom, sweat, bile, leprosy, necrosis, and liquified organs. The paintings were amalgamations of pornography, sadomasochism, war, and demonography. There was a room filled with abstract mandalas. There was another devoted entirely to sexual torture. Like everything else in Phantasmagorika, the paintings were still wet.
The gruesome art gallery was a labyrinth unto itself, one which took the Necrodelic several minutes to escape, his crimson eyes observing every glistening masterpiece as he passed. He exited into yet another pentagrammed foyer with five doors and a mass of severed limbs dangling above. He had no idea what part of Phantasmagorika he now inhabited. The fall had been one that included many directions other than down.
He crept along hallways and rotundas, up rampways and living serpent ladders, and through a myriad of the grisly foyers. The voices and footsteps were still audible, but they seemed now to be far in the distance, the spoken words indecipherable babbling. He discovered locked serpentoriums, brain reservoirs, and multitudinous sleeping chambers, one adorned with beds of nails, one with beds of fire, one with coffins, and one with cocoons. He found a cage of prism marked in ancient runes that read "The Lunatic", and inside was a feral scarlet beast, menstruating from all of its numerous genitalia, both male and female, slavering blood, its bulging eyeballs psychotic, limbs and tentacles thrashing. It had an external circulatory system like Satan himself, and several hearts hanging like scrotums and breasts all over its body.
Chariah experienced the sudden falls a few more times as well, each time the mysterious steep precipices disguised by mirages and shadows. Every fall took him to another random part of Phantasmagorika, and delivered him unconscious. Chariah had no way of mapping the dream-eater's castle, which very much resembled the drugs of its master.
The voices and footsteps continued to bait and beckon him, to chase and flee, to stalk and seduce. They had grown closer again, and Chariah found himself once more on the precarious edge of a predator/prey continuum. He decided to stalk the predator, and make the prey hunt him.
"The night is a womb..."
Step.
Chariah crept towards the oncoming footfalls.
"We are all damned..."
The footsteps grew closer, louder, faster.
"Suicide, homicide, genocide..."
The voices grew farther, softer, droning.
"Matricide, patricide, prolicide..."
Chariah stopped. The footsteps were coming from behind now.
"Chronocide, necrocide, Diablocide..."
He was chasing the voices again.
"Death is a drug for Satan to dine on, the dark ambrosia of souls. A spirit menagerie in Hell did Satan decree, for Satan is the omniphage and the omniphiliac."
The footfalls grew louder behind Chariah, heartbeats, then drumbeats, then hoofbeats, then small explosions. The voices were descending upon him, first death-screams, then battle-cries, then dirgelike hymns, then whispered mantras.
The floor disa
ppeared and Chariah fell through it, the primal fear welling up inside him once again, the hallways and chambers of Phantasmagorika swirling past in centrifugal orbits, his body striking the floor heavily and knocking him unconscious, his astrosome hurtling through time, then striking his flesh once, twice, thrice, each blow a psychic whip, flogging him mind, body, and soul.
*
The Necrodelic awoke upon the floor of an empty rotunda. His eyes remained shut as consciousness slowly crept through his flesh. He could hear the voice of the Somniloquist around him, as if in a dream, and the footsteps of the Somnambulist walking towards him, in perfect synchronicity with the slow gong of his heart.
"In the genesis of the universe we were blessed with Satan's sins. Through time, we nurtured that evil and continued to grow, spreading death throughout the cosmos and spilling enough blood to fill entire galaxies. For decillions of years we have battled, died, and reincarnated on the torture wheel of the samsaric cycle. As the apocalypse approaches, the holocaust is within our grasp. Our demon hands deal genocide as the planes of reality fornicate and time burns to its end. Now, as damnation claims everything that has ever lived, the true Messiah of Death must arise, to torture Satan in his very Hell."
Chariah opened his crimson eyes and gazed upon the two tormented beings looming over him. The Somniloquist's eyes were nailed shut, two long nails driven through her eyelids, from the tops of her eye sockets to the skin at their bottoms. Her lips and cheeks had been ripped back from around her mouth in one circular flap and nailed to her temples, the sides of her neck, and her breastbone. Her crimson jaws were exposed as she spoke, moving up and down, her tongue thrashing like an animal on a leash. The connecting tissues of her upper and lower lips were completely torn. Her cheeks had been slit so that they could be pulled farther back and pinned to her skull behind her ears, which she had torn from her head long ago so that she wouldn't have to listen to her own somniloquies. Her nipples had been severed, and her vagina was nailed shut as well, six nails hammered horizontally through her labia from right to left.
Conversely, the Somnambulist's mouth had been nailed shut, the tips of the nails jutting like a spiked collar from his lower jaw. His eyes had been nailed open, a ring of eight small nails pinning lower and upper eyelids to the surrounding flesh. A long nail had been driven into each ear, its spike hidden deep inside, its large grey head visible where it filled his entire earhole. His testicles had been nailed together left to right with a single blow. The opening on the tip of his penis had been enlarged by what looked to be the work of a nail and hammer as well, and gaped redly like the mouth of a nightworm.
Both of them had metal zippers from their groins to their throats, and both had been shaved completely bald, bodies, pubes, and heads alike. The Somnambulist had been given metal claws, driven underneath his fingernails, while the Somniloquist's fingers were permanently splayed by metal wire passed through holes in her fingertips. She had been given one long metal fang, which stretched scythelike to the point of her chin. They were the victims of the Oneirophage's sadistic surgeries, existing in a state of perpetual torment.
And they were fast asleep.
The Necrodelic rose to his feet as the two circled him. The male Somnambulist was more aggressive, and attempted to strike first with his prosthetic claws. Chariah guarded himself with his own black talons, which were so sharp that they cut those of the Somnambulist in half when they closed, scissorlike, around them. The Somnambulist unleashed a powerful headbutt next, which staggered the Necrodelic into the waiting clutches of the Somniloquist. Chariah spun as she attempted to bury her single fang in the base of his spine, held her at arm's length when she tried to bury it in his larynx, then caught it between two of his claws when she stabbed it towards his eye, severing it as cleanly as he had her mate's prosthetic talons. The Somnambulist attacked from behind at a diagonal angle while Chariah was engaged with the Somniloquist. Chariah spun quickly with both of his arms extended, simultaneously catching both the Somnambulist and the Somniloquist in the face with slashing blows, backhanding the Somnambulist while striking the Somniloquist in the side of her neck with a ridge-hand chop. The Somniloquist fell to the floor. Chariah continued spinning and backslashed the Somnambulist, this time cutting his head and torso into four pieces. He completed the revolving assault by kneeling as he spun back again, leaving eight quivering leg pieces amongst the rest of the gory wreckage.
The Somniloquist rose up, lost in another one of her deranged somniloquies. She stood passively, arms at her sides, and spoke. "We are all exhibitionists for Satan. Our souls are fertilizer for Hell. We are all Satan's whores."
Chariah reached out and grabbed the dangling zipperhead at her throat. Sensing the danger, she began frantically attempting to use sorcery, speaking runes and mantras in her soliloquies, but none of them were coherent, or even resembled actual spells. The Necrodelic yanked the zipper all the way down to her nailed labia. All of her organs spilled out at once, hearts, livers, kidneys, intestines, stomachs, lungs, spleens, pancreases, ovaries, all fell onto the floor with accumulative wet noises. They had been tightly packed into her torso, and most of them were not her own.
The Necrodelic stood briefly over the fallen body of the vivisected Somniloquist, then turned to leave the room, only to find himself being clawed at by the amputated arms of the Somnambulist. The Somnambulist's severed head rolled across the ground and began biting at his legs. The other pieces of the Somnambulist's mutilated flesh began flinging themselves at him as if thrown by unseen hands. Chariah snarled and began slashing at the shrapnel, cutting the Somnambulist into hundreds of pieces.
Breathing hard from the combat, the Necrodelic stood over the tiny bits of flesh, only to hear the voice of the Somniloquist again, this time a hundredfold. He turned to find that each of her spilled organs had formed a rudimentary mouth with valves and sphincters and other openings, and each was now speaking a somniloquy while her battered head lolled, singing, upon the ground. Chariah went into another rage, dissecting each of her organs into slivers, carving up her entire body, decapitating her and beating her severed head repeatedly against the wall until her skull disintegrated. Her brains liquified and spread in a pool on the floor, leaving her face a gory dead skin mask in his hand.
The tiny pieces of the Somnambulist were stirring again, writhing around like maggots and cockroaches and launching themselves at him. They stung like hail, raising welts on his body and trying to burrow into his flesh. Enraged, Chariah called forth Hellfire, scorching himself in the process but immolating all the tiny pieces of the Somnambulist. The bloody remnants of the Somniloquist were starting to gibber behind him. Chariah turned and unleashed the Hellfire upon them, too. The flames filled the rotunda, then faded, leaving the Necrodelic ankle-deep in ashes and surrounded by smoke, with open burn wounds covering his body.
Chariah exited the searing heat of the rotunda. The skin was burned from his left forearm, his right bicep, and part of his chest. Exposed beneath it was crimson blood scorched to blackness, wickedly complementing his naturally black tissue and black muscle, the black wounds of a black soul, already beginning to ooze with black pus. They would heal within an hour. The Necrodelic was practically immune to burns and it was impossible to kill him with heat, flames, or smoke because of his advanced levels of pyromancy and necrodelia.
He wandered through the prism palace a while longer. Finally, he reached the top floor, where the Oneirophage lurked. Chariah could smell the exposed brains and dreams along with the scent of his nemesis in the bedchamber at the end of the hall.
The dark cosmos was fading to crimson in the skylights above, as Phantasmagorika was spinning back down through the atmosphere of Grystiawa, to land in some random, dawnlit location upon the planet. The prism palace hit with a jolt, driving its moat and dungeons forcefully, as if by rape, into the ground below. Chariah paused on the way to the Oneirophage's quarters, gazing upwards through the skylights and whistling once, sharply and loudly. He looked
out into the morning for a moment longer, and then, satisfied, walked on down the hall. Outside the Oneirophage's bedchamber, he carved a small alcove in the ceiling, then climbed inside it and curled up like a scorpion to await his prey.
13
The mammoth, atramentous, bestial spaceship hovered in the crimson skies of Grystiawa, sucking up the red rays of Tyterviax like a black hole, reflecting not a single piece of daylight, radiating nothing but midnight darkness and an aura of evil. Unto itself a partial eclipse of the sun, the immense black spaceship lurked in the bleeding stratosphere on hundreds of patiently beating dragon wings, a dark omen beheld by all that inhabited the planet it hung over, waiting to ambush the prone fortress below. Slowly, like a spider upon a single strand of web, the Omnibeast began to lower itself, the eight legs of the Arachniotics, which served as its landing gear, unfolding segment by segment to dangle in the dawn. Shadows fell like bodies across the crimson wastelands, the blood-red plains, the scab-colored moors and dunes and plateaus. Directly below the deathly intergalactic leviathan lay its target, its victim, the prism palace of the Oneirophage, Phantasmagorika.
The rainbow spectrums of the shimmering castle were unaffected by the bestial spaceship's shadows, and remained glittering and glowing while the areas around it were plunged into darkness. The tentacles of the Omnibeast waved and slithered as it descended upon the fortress, wrapping themselves around parapets and adhering themselves to the palace walls. The eight curved legs of the Arachniotics spread to enfold Phantasmagorika in their grasp, and then the Omnibeast unleashed its dark innards upon the fortress. A mass of black entrails, tongues, veins, arteries, phalluses, umbilical cords, and tentacles spilled wetly across the roof of the prism palace, shattering its skylights and penetrating its inner chambers. Gigantic mouths and vaginas closed around parapets and minarets, suckling and thrusting upon their gleaming phallic forms. Hundreds of lips and labia snarled, growled, dilated, suckled, and salivated.