Swords of Steel Omnibus

by Howie K Bentley et al.

  Once through the door I vaguely noticed that I walked upon a downward gradient as mildewed cellar air entered my lungs. It was odd that I may be descending into a basement without negotiating a stairwell but the house had its own personality and it disoriented its inhabitants as it saw fit. There stood I in a sanatorium’s laboratory kept company by my grey-faced clod companion. The bilious yellow luminescence continued its stormy and stroboscopic game revealing and then quickly confiscating its shocking reveals back to pitch black. Chamber-pot-funk oppressed the atmosphere. One couldn’t guess when nor what the next scene would unfold. Depending upon where I found myself in my anxious circular craze, the sudden light exploded upon a most eclectic freakshow of macabre oddities. In the flickering confusion there flashed menacing taxidermies of cryptids such as gigantopithecus and what may have been a serpentine whale. After undeterminable hours, there did appear the next revelation as mason jars containing pickled beasts with abominable deformities became to be and evaporated back into the void. A blackness saturated far beyond the totality of color gave way to some conceptually abstract spectrum until there was dim light in which the asylum collectively breathed life again, although it may have been a simple recording of the past. As vivid as it was, I could not discern what truth there was in the phenomenon. An innumerable mob of pinheads with milky blue cataract eyes were continuously seizing and foaming at the mouth, trapped in unwanted life. I extrapolated that these dispossessed mongrels were forcibly kept for experimental purpose. They were of a singularly poor stock. A dunce-capped fool played the theremin as the half-witted revelers cavorted en masse and were presided over by The Plague Doctor of Nijmegen whom they referred to as “The Great Overshadower of All.” The bird beast before the troglodyte throng attended a table containing an assortment of grimy implements arranged with psychotic organization. Contrary to their presentation, these were but corroded medical tools patented in an age of ignorance. To employ them at present would be vicious barbarism. The Plague Doctor confirmed the worst, calculatingly selecting the oxidized ecraseur then turning to his prey. He brought the crude scissor-thing over her and then hovered long enough for the feebleminded cauldronhead to dumbly observe that menacing device. She shuddered, drooled and droned as she locked mask-eyes with The Doctor, who by giddy bodily language displayed that he was gaining droll amusement from terrorizing the fool. Her naked body was fettered tight against a cold steel medical table with parched leather restraints which held her sufficiently still despite her shaking horror. The beak-nosed masochist brought his tool to her open loins and when her screams came, blood trickled from the table’s bloodletting hole. Trickles gradually flowed into a faithful babbling. The Doctor worked vigorously until her blood fell meaty. As her agonized drivel waned, there slowly plopped upon the floor the pathetic crowning precipice of a crimson gore pile. I gasped and crushingly gripped my guide’s skeleton hand, imploring it to know if there were rime or reason as to why I bared witness to such senseless abomination! I hadn’t a split second’s reprieve before my emaciated, grey, plastic-complexioned, and retard guide gestured towards a freshly unfolding horror which instantaneously commanded my attention in a darkened corner of the infirmary. I trained upon a scene in dark so deep I need adjust my eyes until sensory adaptation took hold and the hazy outline of a nun-hag-with-patient-form filled out of the blackness. The outlined figures were accented by ember glow from a nearby crematory chamber. The presence of vermin pestilence came creeping into my feelings via weird perception which I was only beginning to understand. The nun-hag held an old man amputee, diagonally suspended by his one foot while she wiped the waste from his unmentionable regions. He was covered in small black insects which moved quickly about his brown body and were beginning to transfer onto her forearm. He sadly looked at me fully conscious of his poignancy. The odor of insect feces and geriatrics lingered heavier and the shriveled little man remained fixed upon me communicating a sense of warning. I felt the bugs upon my skin. The roach-reek unyieldingly gained strength and the perpetual molestation of biting insects upon me indoctrinated me into a new meaning of madness. Maggots under his skin made it quiver and once punctured by the hag-nun they gushed forth, releasing a traumatizing death stench. The nun-hag began to feed the gaping furnace jaws with the little man. I fell faint as my mind and body surrendered to terror.

  My spirit was utterly broken of despair to wake in the basement of that unholy house. Sleep was so sweet, and I fully expected to wake safely in the house of my nativity far north from here. My only consolation was that all traces of the ghastly asylum scene were absent and the great room was empty save the wet filth caked upon its foundation stones. If I was unsure that I may be standing before the portal to hell, my subsequent experience was to provide me with total conviction. My dumb guide was mindlessly floating in circles waiting for my eyes to open. Preempting my thoughts of escape, the gray retard seized my wrist and swept me to a remote shadowed basement corner. It dumped me at the threshold of what appeared to be an anomalous grotto or what may be the burrow of a fair sized animal. It was indeed a well if not all three guesses were true. Another certainty regarding this odd little hole is that it stretched to extreme depths and as I gazed downward, I had the intuition that it was nothing less than a shaft to a vast subterranean realm. A sick luminescence pulsated far away down that hole. That living glow was from the same supernatural family as the one which lurked above in the loathsome mansion—albeit this one manifested itself in the hue of a nauseous green. The stench of serpent musk issued forth from the hole’s mouth as if those dank green netherworlds were looking back up at me and released an offensive sign of acknowledgement. A soft-whistling wind began deep below and increased in momentum until I gradually perceived that it was not a wind but a vacuum. The revelation struck panic in me as there was scant an object to cling to before the great shaft inhaled me. I was now numb to surreal terror and submissively accepted my descent with suicidal abandon, the grey retard faithfully tumbling behind me. Eventually the shaft opened and we plunged through open air for an undeterminable passage of silent dark moments until breaking some surface and submerging into a bacterial soup. One would expect to be forced to abysmal fathoms by our great momentum, yet having only sunken into the viscous ectoplasm but a few yards, it was apparent that the only consistency in this realm was its inconsistency in the laws of physics and the learned-in-general. My head emerged and the green bioluminescent glow revealed none but a low-hanging fog upon the gelatinous and primordial substance through which I laboriously treaded as some dull suction came from beneath. For a fleeting moment I felt the vindication of fortune when I aimlessly propelled myself in a random, fear-guided, blind direction, and with little effort my hand chanced upon a muddy bank. My fingers clenched into the warm rotting leaves and clay as I pulled myself from the gelatin. Looking back, I saw that the gray-thing (now my only shadow in this dark world) hovered above the surface as though he never submerged into the slime with me at all.

  I laid in filth and observed my surroundings, resting with anxiety over the next phenomenon that was sure to come to antagonize me at any moment. I puzzled over how I had lost my measure of time and was oblivious as to how I had transcended from the indoor world of that loathsome mansion to this new lost realm of the outdoors—let alone how I may ever return to the open road from whence this grim misadventure originated. The subterranean world opened around me as the fog vaporized at cue. Above me loomed a gnarled tree canopy of Spanish Moss-draped willow with invasive serpentine vinery woven throughout. Arboreal beasties, alien in their lankiness, precariously dangling by long arms, crept back into the lofty bramble once noticed. At eye level there stretched before me a dismal swampscape. Poisonous groundcover blanketed the archipelago of diminutive terra firma humps protruding from the misty bacterial broth simmering on the horizon. Upon the rotted knob upon which I sat, tenebrous berms teemed with ostensibly intelligent cottonmouths which writhed, and hissed, and expelled putrid glandular stench in outwa
rd aggression towards me. The world around me droned low with the cacophony of a myriad distant and frightfully arcane varmint. Ape woops of the wampus and grassman were particularly perturbing. Some sounds were weird copies of familiar macabre ones, comparable to the ghostly whip-poor-will, and the katydids of late August who sadly usher summer’s end. In every direction, bulbous frogs on mucky toadstools grew to grotesque prepositions—whose saucer eyeshine flickered in the blackness beyond my visibility. The bald cypresses appeared to all be stricken with malignant outgrowths which resembled the tube nests of mud dauber wasps with diameters suggesting them a product of a prehistoric Permian Period. On tiny islands in the nebulous distance I squinted to discern they may be littered with diagonally standing totems resembling bony newt people. About the cryptic figures danced orbs of foxfire which I intuitively knew to be jealously protective spirits. Shoals of glassy-scaled and eyeless fish swirled and transfixed me as I peered into their stagnant slop. These creatures inexplicably filled me with hatred, save that I fancied them all the devils’ imps and familiars. The Grayman remained patiently hovering over me, familiar with and disinterested in his environs. Surmising I had absorbed enough, he sluggishly lifted me by the underarms and took me on a languid flight above the infirm bubbling wastes. Below the archipelago became a sinuous and stippled outline resembling its various crawling denizens. What purpose did the Grayman have for me now? I feebly lifted my neck to behold in the distance the craggy spires of a distant promontory issuing forth from the sleepily wiggling gel, and presiding almighty over the Great Dismal Wastes. The atmosphere became insufferably sticky as we neared the menacing ascension, and faintly increasing in volume, came the chants of some Neolithic religion resounding from its island shores.

  The heights above the promontory’s craggy shores was a place The Gularian Priestesses wouldn’t dare. Their ritual was protective. Both of these notions were discerned solely of my newfound and pronounced conviction in my own clairvoyance, though I knew not from where these women came nor where they went when they were finished. Surely they could not dwell here for prolonged periods as the rock was permeated in extreme evil. The Grayman suspended me directly over them and they continued their rite, consummately, and ignored our presence. Were they spectres or were they amongst us spectres? White-eyed and with obsessive repetition they swayed amongst the flames and spoke with wyrd tongue:

  “Oh Miss Green Teeth of The Well...

  ...She’ll surface when it swells...

  ...You’ve given your goods to the witch in the woods...

  ...You could turn back to being good which you probably should...

  ...Lest she pull you down to Hell!”

  Their ritual had dramatic effect as a densely defined circle of the tree canopy withered and far beyond, in simultaneous succession, the cloud cover dissipated to reveal a waxing-horned-red-moon. Lunar rays shot their ugly glow with spotlight efficiency on the devil’s rock and seized the ritually induced opportunity to menace their beholders. The gray retard floated us to the rock’s precipice and dropped me into a phosphorescent pool which collected in its highest spire. It was there I would encounter the murderous bog woman.

  She had been there forever—this and the following I inferred from new perception. I was in Miss Green Teeth’s den. Through said perception (and now I knew it to be dark perception), I first met the limp-wristed troglodyte with fidgety zygodactylous digits and gore-slathered lips: humanoid, yet predating hominids. Her home made me vomit in terror as my surroundings gave new meaning to swamp horror. I retraced her history through psychic energy embedded on all I touched. Black jelly egg sacks bobbed in brackish water where she knew the children couldn’t be found. She relished in absconding with them into the night whence she emptied their bodies of life so they may sour with her evermore. She laid them in the willows where the marsh tides could carry their bodies out to skeletonize in the silt and rotting hyacinth. Her bog was littered with petraglyphs from some antediluvian epoch of beforetime. That ancient rock graffiti depicted the most peculiar beings whose form contradicted earthly evolution. After puzzling at them, unsure of what the eye initially saw, I saw that they were clearly engaged in lowly acts of depravity—taboo even at a primate level. In dire desperation, I implored higher forces that I not encounter this lowly thing!

  She surfaced, and I saw her in all her grim tangibility for the first time. She was quintessentially unhealthy and so thoroughly disgusting in appearance I implored that we not be fashioned by the same universe, let alone exist in the same. She further encroached half-bodied before me and reached out malevolently so as to snatch me and steal away with me to her cold, cold riverbed den. She wickedly and yearningly stretched and clutched at the air between us. Her rank breath wheezed with the overexertion of an animate corpse. That malignant breath whistled through craggy olive teeth, reeking of a wet and feral mongrel coupled with a midsummer’s hot garbage pile. Inasmuch she was intolerably fetid, she moreover was matted—generally stringy, and the personification of all things swamp-crawly. Outrageous repulsion gasped forth from my involuntarily agape mouth as the noxious breakwaters retracted to reveal her lack-there-of entirety; a half body with gangly arms and wagging tailbone that squirmed with the annelids mining the rancid meat remaining on her rib cage. Her mossy, withered, and rotten-pear-like breasts drooped dismally as pubic algae swayed from her underarms. Her sodden skin was speckled with lentigines and fishy spots. Pollywogs thronged and nibbled about her in the brownish substrate. A raspy hiss strained from her gullet in demonstration of her gruesome lust for me to writhe and cavort eternally in the sludge with her. Black energy evenly flowed from her. I mawkishly longed to return to a time when I was ignorant to her being. At present, I was vaguely distracted by the realization that I had not felt the Grayman’s presence for some time at which point I had the morbid revelation that he had crept inside of me. I was but his possessed vessel and my limbs moved of another’s volition. This great teacher of fear and depravity took embrace of the putrid Miss Green Teeth and down the vortex we slid—to be abducted, defiled, and held in abeyance in the yawning gloom for eras upon eras.

  I awoke in an arid chamber with the detailed and unwelcome memory of my age in the bog whilst betrothed to the rotted, sodden halfbody. I remembered-in-dream how the humidity had dissipated and the halfbody mummified to stillness and finally her grisly croaks and whistles were forever mercifully silenced. The Grayman hovered calmly in the darkness near me. His dull luminescence provided the nearest margin of light required to espy that I may be in some crypt, as I softly felt, whiffed, and perhaps saw whirls of grave dust blowing through the total darkness of some boundless mausoleum of the long foregone. I strongly perceived that I was hidden deep near the center of eternity where the world’s core perpetually burned. I felt certain that from my coma I had wholly metamorphosed into an empath, telepath, and clairvoyant. I perceived that I was now entombed with The Fool King. I was obliged to press forth and convene with this third spectral tutor and absorb his select mastery of forbidden insight. Down the Neolithic catacomb corridors we went, guided by the Grayman’s spectral emissions on a gradual slope towards chambers untouched by light nor wind. Crumbling relief statues flanked the corridors depicting the self-serving existence and maudlin demise of a lord ignored by history. It was here that I learned the particulars of his regrettable life’s journey. Trailing behind him was an innumerable herd of sycophants whom he collected as treasure and surrounded himself with. Their procession stretched the length of a vast desert land. I felt I walked amongst and with them, as I observed the raised carvings by the light of my old supernatural travel companion. Onwards we trudged slantingly downwards towards the black star’s heat source. I and the lowly followers shadowed The Fool King, better to indulge him on his march of wanton destruction than to obstruct its path with one’s futile polemics. Winding through stygian promenades, the weak-hearted kept in step with one another as the serpent’s head pointed his finger and consigned his kingdom’
s denizens to poignant fates. On a moment’s whim he commissioned, by quick and arrogant gesture, titanic effigies in his likeness to stipple the map in profusion and where under a myriad spurning candidates fornicated under command of the king for his absurd merriment. The aforementioned facts were made clear from the stories told in stone coupled with my uncanny sight, yet it was the latter of my perceptions which completed the forthcoming assertions about The Fool King’s character—for as I drew nearer to his place of final rest, I felt his ugliness look upon my own soul. He was a man who only knew himself through his alter ego. A disgrace to his venerable bloodline whose name he solely bastardized, he was an unbridled exhibitionist with the predisposition for petulance and entitlement. If there was humility within him it dwelled as a schizophrenic split personality, long abandoned and bricked up in a solitary dungeon. He only did good to make himself feel good. His comprehension of altruism was by superficial definition. Precious life fleeted before him punctuated by petty gloating and the conviction that others were designed for servitude. In the end people watched uncaringly as he slowly died. The Fool King refused to admit that he could feel himself rotting. He stupidly smiled while death was near. In the end of all endings, there came to completion an era seers came to view as The Drastic Tragedy. There was a between period when civilization lay dormant, approaching a new age of control as another’s kingdom would rise to a time which would be classic. Beneath the ruins glowed the tenacious embers of possibility—a future on to which beloved leaders and valiant heroes came to rule and inter the memory of The Fool. As I finally stood at the threshold of his tomb I realized he lived still in some fashion. His lunatic reign spawned and dispersed everlasting phantoms upon the land as well as the collective unconscious of tomorrow. Through my mind’s eye I saw the desert highway he haunted. It was a path that meandered as far as the eye could see—and was littered with the eclectic pieces of a million broken hearts that all belonged to him.