When she woke up, it was at her home in the hills, Connie had saved her. He explained that while no one really knew how or what had bitten her leg, she had been infected with a strange virus that seemed to feed off of human tissue by claiming a host. Cindy was that host but Connie was confident he could keep her as human as possible through modern medicine and daily treatments. He told her how expensive it would be and she agreed. “Money well spent.” She’d said as he hooked her up to the machines for the first time.
He also explained to her that he’d hired a private security firm to investigate Stull Cemetery for the creature that had hurt her. Their investigation was still ongoing and they sent weekly reports to Connie for his review. Most of the reports were filled with failure but over the last few weeks, some of the men had gone missing in the Cemetery. The Captain who sent the reports thinks the men are just tired of going over the same old ground and have quit the job. But Connie suspects something more is going on and everyone is afraid to say anything.
When her video was released, it went straight to number one on the charts. Her new vocal range was credited to a recently deceased vocal coach. The money and performance offers came in like a deluge. Cindy was set for life and so was Connie.
The knock on Cindy’s door broke her reverie “Come in.” she called, and Connie opened the door. Cindy could see his medical cart behind him.
“Who’s the corpse?”
“No one really.” She said smiling; she stood up and crossed the room to where Connie was standing. She reached out with her left arm and exposed the first PICC line to Connie, he turned his back. She leapt.
The last thing Connie heard was Cindy laughter.
The Beginning…
* * *
Skip Novak is a Pollack from Green Bay, Wisconsin and now lives in Southeastern Virginia. He spent four years serving in the United States Navy on board the USS Austin and now gets paid to play with toy trains. When he is not working, he enjoys riding bikes with his daughter and spending time on his front porch smoking cigars and trying to write. Occasionally he ventures out into the world to visit with friends and family only to come back a richer and wiser person for the experience. You can find him on Facebook where he has been known to leave a message or two for those that wish to communicate with him. He also can be found on Twitter or if you wish to read his blog the address is http://aloysiousthoughts.blogspot.com/
BONE MANOR REVISITED
DAVID BROCKIE
-1-
Bone Manor had been empty for 200 years…or so they said.
I correct myself. “They” is the wrong word. “They” was only “him.” “Him” was the bald and portly example of the human species, regarding me from across the counter of a murky bar, of which we were the sole occupants. It was strange that this bar, The Gaping Gargoyle, was empty during Red Dog season. The city was bristling with life and spear-points as visitors poured in from all over the continent. And a colorfully mixed bunch they were, some travelling many miles for reasons less obvious than mere celebration. I had seen sea-merchants from Keristan, slavers from Talingar, file-toothed barbarians hailing from furthest Gorget—the species went on and on. I had even seen a contingent of dwarves stomping down Manticore Lane, singing in their deep and rolling voices about the grim stone halls they called their homes.
Stinking dwarves. I’ve always hated dwarves…hated their aloofness, their traditions, hated their gnarled hands—hated everything about them. The stubby little bastards made me want to spit teeth.
“Yes, business is slow, that’s for sure,” said my solitary companion as he placed a foaming crock of some powerful libation in front of me. He scooped up my money and eyed me warily. “That’s not to say that I have no business at all.”
From somewhere deep within my chest, my voice poured out. “Of all the races mixed up in this town, you’d be hard pressed to find a matched pair anywhere. But they do need one thing, all of them. They need a place to stay.”
“Now hear me, barkeep!” My voice rose as he turned away from me. “Red Dog is the biggest celebration in the New World. The Overlord makes certain the streets run red with wine and dog-brothers such as I make sure they run red with freshly spilt blood.”
I paused to wipe off the excess saliva, which threatened to ooze down my chin onto my leather-worked breastplate at any moment. With a mouth like mine, long speeches, yes, even long thoughts, tended to get rather sticky.
“I have been asked to leave three hotels since my arrival and been refused admittance to many others,” I said quietly, struggling to control my dribble. “Now I find the Gaping Gargoyle. I find it devoid of customers. Indeed this entire block seems to be full of nothing but failing, deserted, and squalid structures. And stranger still…no beggars.”
A silver thread of saliva snaked its way from my ruined mouth to the stained counter. The barkeep wiped up my expectorations and gave me a piteous look.
“Well, the truth of that is a long story…a long story indeed,” he said.
Predictable, I thought, as I dug my good hand into my coin pouch. I hoped his explanation wouldn’t take too long as I only had eight coins left.
I slapped down two. “All right, old man. Start your long story, but be quick for my patience dwindles,” I demanded.
Again, he took my money. He knew he had me, and his whole manner changed. He smiled broadly, revealing a set of cracked and blackened choppers. “I will tell all, but first you must answer me something, and promise not to be annoyed.”
My single functioning eyeball stared back at him, full of hate but prepared to receive the inevitable question. As if to somehow guarantee his safety he gave me back one of my coins, put a hand beneath the bar to the hilt of an unseen weapon, and slowly said…
“What happened to your face?”
-2-
The next dawn found me on the cobbled street in front of the Gaping Gargoyle. It wasn’t quite light yet, and the city slumbered around me. I gazed over the many towers, beyond the battlements—my eye plumbed the clearing sky, travelling in a great sweeping circle until it plummeted back to the earth, coming to rest on the grim edifice, which occupied the entire block south of me.
Bone Manor. “The mere whisper of that name will draw evil stares,” Ferd had said, Ferd being the bartender I had spent most of the night (and all of my money) in conversation with. I pulled my cloak closer around me and shuddered as I remembered the evil tale he had told me.
It was a dark monument in the history of the city, a place wrapped in a shroud of mystery, a mystery made even more so by the many tales of great suffering and eternal woe. These were some of the phrases he had used. And re-used. Ferd knew his trade well and dragged his story out until he was convinced my money pouch was empty. Still, I had decided not to eat his soul and pull his glistening entrails out on my portable gut-loom, as he had supplied me with a hearty repast once he had learned my true intentions.
“A man’s last meal should be his finest,” he had said.
Bone Manor had been empty for 200 years…or so they said. The huge hotel had been one of the City-States main attractions for years, and catered to only a mysterious and powerful clientele. People like the then-Emperor Tarkalect the Turgid, his court and senators, ambassadors from both the New and Old Worlds, and dark sorcerers and priests who owed their allegiance to a virtual horde of supernatural deities, demons, and demigods. They came for many reasons but one of the biggest ones was also one of the most common—Bone Manor sported the finest collection of concubines ever assembled in the New World.
Within the great halls of the manor were held endless revels of unrivaled perversity. No expense was spared in delighting and sometimes even terrifying their guests, and as the hotel’s reputation grew, so did the scope of the debauchery. It had also been a place of great intrigue and diversity. A thousand schemes were hatched nightly, and bodies often turned up in one of the hotel’s many side alleys, and even once in a stew pot set before a visiting dignitary who
that night dined unknowingly on his favorite page. The place was steeped in a deep darkness, but nary was a word of protest ever spoken due to the nature of the Manor’s owner, the mysterious, reclusive, and incredibly rich Baron Von Spleen.
Human eyes had supposedly never beheld the Baron. Wrapped in wealth and extravagance, he wore his silence well. He supposedly ran every facet of the Manor’s operation from somewhere deep within the bowels of the complex. Rumors to his origin and even his race ran rampant. Some said he was a powerful sorcerer from the Old World, and that running the hotel was his way of escaping his many enemies, both mortal and supernatural. Nobody seemed to mind his lack of physical presence, and he provided everybody with a good conversation piece. His persona radiated from the center of Bone Manor like a veiled candle. There was something very bizarre about the way people’s skins crawled when they talked or even thought about their unseen host for too long.
Whoever he had been, he had the distinction of throwing the best parties around. Those who attended the parties, these dizzying displays of decadence and depravity, were the prosperous sorts who supplied the numerous City-State trade guilds with a plentiful income. It was a good arrangement for everyone concerned. In short, the Baron was accepted because he was mysterious and had lots of money. He was allowed his eccentricities, whatever his motivations.
Until the Ripper came.
Some said it was a slavering thing let loose from the deepest pits of Acheron. Others speculated that it was the vengeful spirit of one or more of the City-States many rulers, miffed at its perceivably too-short rule and bent on a bloody reap. An ancient enemy? A crazed chicken? No one could say, as no one had ever seen it and lived.
But all agreed it certainly did rip. On a rare quiet night at the Manor, eight guests were found hideously mutilated, their guts festooning their opulent quarters like garlands. Panic broke out quickly as the many guests ran screaming into the night, as others took the time to loot vacated rooms. The Baron made a personal appeal to the guests (via his staff) that the situation was under control. A gargantuan spread at a huge party, and a free night’s lodgings convinced many to return, and many of these were next to die. The screams of the slaughtered rang through that endless night, and when it was over, the Manor was empty again.
That was enough for the Emperor, who dispatched a unit of twenty Shockers, the elite cadre of City-State troopers. On a grim and grey morning, they breached the great beaten copper doors of the Manor. The hushed crowd outside knew it was not a good sign when the great doors boomed shut and resisted all subsequent attempts to open them. From that moment onwards, Bone Manor was a shunned place. The windows were boarded, the main gate chained. You didn’t go in and come back out.
Finally, I had found a hotel.
-3-
Two hundred years later that same chain remained on the gate. I regarded it in the blue-ish pre-dawn darkness, studying the heavily rusted iron, twisted and gnarled into dizzying patterns. It was fastened securely with an iron lock, and all of it was of obvious Dwarvenmake. Those little buggers could sure work steel. For some reason it made me hate them even more.
The very air was charged with the smell of crazy logic, and as I touched a gauntleted hand to the cold metal, I could sense the bloated evil, which permeated the place.
Yes, it was here. Perhaps it was deep below. There, in the pits of ever-night which were the bowels of this place, it would feast on my soul. One day it would eat all of our hearts, as part of the same bloody banquet it had begun two hundred years ago. Oh, how I longed for it, and the kiss of un-death.
Beyond the gate, a tangle of bushes had grown wild for two centuries. The density of the undergrowth rendered itself into one great cancerous growth, seemingly impenetrable. It rose higher than the ten-foot fence and blocked all the ground between myself and the manor proper. And from this sea of living filth arose bloody Bone Manor.
Never before had I beheld a structure as hellishly unsettling as bloody Bone Manor. Dwarfed within its shadow I felt crushingly puny and insignificant, as the central mass of the structure loomed above me, easily two hundred feet high. Squat and fat like a great toad it was, with a skin of deep, wet stone, worked beyond intricacy to immediately grab the eye and roll it about the place, until it was swept upwards with the massive towers flanking either side of the massive central dome. They jutted into the sky like accusatory fingers, fashioned from black obsidian.
But how? The towers were twisted and misshapen, and their surfaces dripped with a thousand throbbing skullaches. Such stonework I had never seen and my quest for hell had taken me far. I strained my eyes through the silence and gloom and made out hosts of carved figures staring back at me. But they merged and rushed together in a gush of frozen and eternal torment that seemed so much like nothing else than the stone was poured into place while in its molten form, and then congealed into the towers of Bone Manor. The artisans responsible for this must have labored a lifetime, and the secrets of their craft died with them. Judging from their labors, they now carved in hell.
And I was going in there. Yes. Not for the adventure or the booty or any of the other reasons I might have had for going in there. I was going in there to find death, tempt death, and spit in death’s grinning face.
As he has spat in mine, my beautiful face.
In a murky alley running parallel to one of the manor’s side fences, I checked my equipment. I lovingly caressed the hilt of Wick, as I called her, and I found her cool and constant in her singular purpose. Wick was my bloodletter, my blade, my claim to this life and the one beyond. She would come with me when I went. She was all I loved. Time and time again we had spun the red concentric circles of death. She was made of cold, dark iron, gut and bone. On the scabbard eel-worms writhed.
More toys I had, spiked ball, dirk, chain and torch, such things as one found useful in the bowels of the earth.
Up a crate—I grasped one of the top spikes with my good hand. In a single motion, I was up and over, forever crossing that first plane. I dropped WHUNFF landing heavily in a jangle of equipment as I was sucked up to my armpits in that wretched, clotting weed. I forced my way under.
Immediately I lost the sun. I felt the exposed areas of my nighted face, felt the tendrils of growth brushing against it. This caused me pain, as my soul was bared. I fumbled at the veil of heavy material I used to cover my mangled visage. The sudden unveiling of it tended to have peculiar effects on people.
I began to crawl forward, making more noise than a dying woman. I was at times totally blind as I writhed forward through the brush. There was no let up to its thickness or an end to its clutching grip. To make a game of it I became a fish, a fish who strained against a tremendous current of vomit, which spilled forth from the maw of some hideous hell-beast. Yet I strained forward, for I had to kiss the face of this god.
I finally managed to struggle to my knees, which led me to my feet. I could see now, a little.
I could see the first signs of stonework ahead, and the cobbles beneath my booted feet had held back the vomit-growth to the point that there was a sort of clearing before the wall began.
These things I saw, but I heard the dash of motion, sensed the object blurring below and to the right. Purpose surged and my body uncoiled, pivoting, drawing my blade and plunging it down in one motion into the furry mass which crumpled at my edge, spewing gouts of hot filth from its bursting entrails. Stinking rat, fat rat, curl your lip and die. I kicked it away.
And so did the first die, and I prayed many more would follow. Rat or man, they were still food, though the souls of humans were much more valuable to the crackling creatures of the lower depths who coveted such things. One day I would make this change. Perhaps on this day. It filled me with joy.
I wiped and sheathed Wick, and looked up the tower wall. I intended to scale this and breach the building through a flighty window. Through a carpet of weeds dotted with the emerging dawn, the agonized faces of two stone demons merged with the upwards rush of stone
. They peered at me, but I spurned them with my boot and bile and began to climb away from that hideous growth. It clutched at me and made me feel unclean. But I broke free of it at last, and I hurled myself upwards through the drying sea of horror. I felt the cool morning spray about my eye, the only exposed area of my face. Reaching up, I felt cold stone to hold, to pull myself up and away. I didn’t stop until I was halfway up the tower, where I seated myself upon the knee of a twisted maiden of stone.
I gazed leisurely at the panorama below. The city sprawled out around me, the houses and towers strewn about like so many discarded children’s toys. The city was beginning to open its bloodshot eyes, and I could see activity in several areas. Gazing into the street below I could make out the form of an old woman trundling down the otherwise deserted street, her back bent nearly double beneath her twisted spine.
“You! Old woman!” I croaked.
She paused in her step, as if blind or lost. Again, I assailed her with my muffled scream. Finally, she looked up and saw me.
I drew Wick and flashed the stained blade in the brightening sun.
“Tell them! Tell them!”
With that, I pulled myself into a window, fashioned to resemble a gaping mouth. I smashed the boards asunder and poised myself on the dark threshold. But then, behind me, I heard the hag calling me in the guttural tongue she used. I turned about and saw the woman in the process of pulling her filthy garment over her head and shaking her twat in my general direction. I strained to hear what words she used but they were swallowed up by the void that separated us. Her words were lost and she said no more, replacing her rags over her filthy hole and returning to her pointless existence.
And I went in.
To anticipate death is to stay alive so my blade was out before my boots met the floor. As I slung my warboard off my back and bound it to my left arm with a length of rawhide, I took in my new world.
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