MASQUE MACABRE 
(previously published in Horror Garage #6)

With mask, and antique pageantry,
Such sights as youthful poets dream
On summer eves by haunted stream.
Milton, L'Allegro

Thunder rumbled the bruised sky, echoic of the restless dead.  The drumming came deep and desperate as if countless rotting hands pounded against coffin and crypt.  Louder, ever louder, the percussive blows resounded, the muffle of putrid flesh destroyed.  Now--solid fists of bone rapped the ghastly rhythm with more force.

Adelie hearkened to the wail of wretched voices lifting in the wind.  Grimly attuned, she felt their despair as cold and unrelenting as the rain.

With a fury-flash of lightning, the ancestral cemetery was revealed, all silver, grey and bone, at the edge of the estate.  Shadowy flutters harangued the headstones.  Adelie shuddered, envisioning the swirling violet-black iris petals as starving ravens in search of flesh, as walcryies, corpse-eaters arrayed in lustrous onyx feathers, coming for the dead.

The carrion garden flickered in a final display of hoary slashes then shrouded itself again with dark.  In the light of her imagination, she still saw the sodden ground offering its raven-feeders, its gross-dripping bounty of decay.      

Adelie pulled the windows shut on the sluicing feast and carelessly dried her arms on the hangings of velours noir.  But the whimpering cadence of the dead seeped in through the glass and misted her wounded skin with miasmic tears.  She felt sickly damp and chilled as if touched, beseeched, by long-embalmed hands.  

"Hush," she whispered, bowing her head in reverence, in acquiescence.  "The psychopomp shall come."

Resting her cheek against the pane, Adelie wept for the hrafengrennir, the unclaimed dead, as omens rent the air.  Crack of swords and skeletons, of skulls splitting in shrieks and groans, of death grinding bodies into dust over and over again and again.

The night pulsed with haunting tones and mad music.  In the hall the ancient clock chimed midnight-the darkest hour, which sang of the wolf, the witch and the ghost€”and heralded that black-shining moment of transcendence, when reality became dream and nightmare.

The twelfth hour was Adelie's.  At midnight she masqueraded in another face, as another person, in another world--transforming the harsh ugly truth of life for a spell.  At midnight there were no scars, no pain, no cowering fears, no crippling dread so much darker than the darkest hour.

The last of the tolls faded away.  She shifted from the window and prepared her costume.  She plunged her hands into liquid color, tepid and mucky as visceral wastes.  Smoothing the Cimmerian shades onto her body, she languidly caressed them into her skin, then slipped into her elaborate fan of iridescent ebon wings.  She donned a mask selected from the many hanging on the walls--totems of slain valiants, puissant demons, discarded deities.

What god resided in the mask?  What spirit would possess its wearer? Adelie wondered as she adjusted the mask, as she adorned herself in dark mystery.

Old blood speckled the mirror, but she admired her beauty nonetheless.  Black leather masked her brow, eyes, nose and cheeks, strangely crowning her head with the twists and branches of scarlet-veined cornute forms.  Her eyes were tricked malicious red, her salacious lips lined with black and glistening with a shade as bright as fresh spilled blood.

Adelie was midnight's spirit-dark and foreboding, dread and potent in her destiny. 

#### 

In the ballroom, gilded mirrors and crystal chandeliers reflected the wavering gold-radiance of candlelight.  Shadows danced across the parquet floor, sinuous-swirling in symphony with the storm.

Adelie hummed the song of the dead as she swayed onto the gleaming floor, its inlaid woods sighing with her slide and mourning the emptiness suffered.  For half a century, this floor had hosted fetes of grandeur, replete with the dizzy rounds and bacchant carousing of Narcissistic revelers in Babylonian finery.  Only Death, dressed in dust and ashes, danced for the rest of the century.  Dust that Adelie disturbed as she waltzed with the shadows to the center of the room.  Beneath a high glass dome, she pirouetted, black wings spread, feathers fluttering in her whirl as if she were soaring down from the umbral sky.

Lightning silvered the translucent hemisphere, radiating down, its sylph-like dancer aureoled in vicious starlight.  Adelie's skin tingled with the dark-electric fondling of the storm.  

Metamorphic in her mask and winged helmet, she shrieked, her voice high as a harp, piercing as a raven's cry. 

She saw her guests, her raven-feeders, sitting stiffly in ornate high-backed chairs.  With expressions stiffer still, they watched her through their waxy masks of death.

There was Mother, her beloved mouth elongated and yawning in horror, an eternal Munch-scream; the expression forever burned into tar by her husband€“-a man who carried a different torch of love.  

And Sister, her face styled in cerulean blue blush and blood-jelly mouth, eyes sunken and soft behind tear-drop lids, gazing upward in helpless, useless supplication€“-just as she had when Brother strangled her. 

Finally Adelie set her eyes upon Grandmere, the matriarch of misery, from whom all suffering had sprung, the monster birthed from her own loins and suckled sweetly at her breast.  Execrable affections, his legacy; malignity, his blood.  He manifested a living sin so unholy that it passed undiluted into his son.  His sister sired upon, her lurid womb expelling wastes for his grave and bloody appetites.  The mansion resonated with such screams, with the hysterical surge of slaughter.  But, at the darkest hour, there was only the sweet ashy poetry and murmur of the beckoning dead.

As a child, Adelie would steal away with Grandmere into the cemetery and purloin the fetid faces of the familial dead.  They'd prance like twilight wraiths through the gardens, with masks as rotten as their lives.

Now Grandmere wore no mask.  Seven decades of weakness, shame and knowledge at last congealed into a final strength.  Yesterday's midnight she kissed Adelie good-bye, lips lingering withered velvet love, and then took the deadly kiss of the heirloom English Enfield.  Grandmere looked a flower in wilted bloom, the remaining shreds of her head hanging in rose and cream petals, still wafting a burnt bouquet of sulphur and charcoal.  In masquerade, she was a flower waiting for the rains of blood and spring to bring rebirth.

Indeed, they all waited. 

"The psychopomp comes," Adelie said as the walcyrie of midnight descended from her dance and onto the dead.  Lips soft in desperate hungry kisses, tasting the salt of tears and death, she claimed the hrafengrennir.  

Teeth tore into cold flesh, susurrant as the rain.  

Fingers stroking her silken-sex, she fed:  Mother, in the crunch of char and bone; Sister, in soupy remains; Grandmere, in the ravage of pulpy meat.  All of it culminated with the storm, throbbing, pent-furious energy released.

The walcyrie aligned with wrath for battle. 

Rain splashed like blood pouring from an army of bodies staked and gutted; the nebulus black roared thunderous alarms, omens ripping through the night.  Her knife ripped as well but through flesh.  The blade sank squishy, heavily, as if into wet clay, and Father burbled, his masking-tape mummified face oozing the rubious crude of his many sins.

Adelie then slit her own veins and danced again, showering the floor in a storm of her blood, becoming in her silent frolic forever midnight's spirit, dark and foreboding, dread and potent in her destiny.