Secrets of the Bones

CHAPTER ONE:

"That the sons of God saw the daughters
of men were fair; and they took them wives of
all which they chose."
Genesis 6.2

"There were giants in the earth in those
days; and also after that, when the sons of God
came in unto the daughters of men,
and they bare children to them, the same
became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."
Genesis 6.4

"These are the Grigori, who with their prince
Satanail rejected the Lord of light..."
Book Of Enoch, XVIII

I.

The smell of suffering summoned them from the darkness.

From the dark of their prisons beneath the heavens, beneath the worlds, beneath the hells...

Quivering, stinking flesh of the wretched awoke their hungers, hungers deeper than the abyss, and drew them out of their silence and their pity. After centuries of chained unrest and torment, they escaped.

The Fallen crept through torturous chasms and entered into the world.

Ravenous.

II.

Far-off in the city, bells tolled. The twelfth hour rung, long and lamenting, as if the night darkened not only the heavens, but the brassy tones as well. Funeral echoes hearkened, and she followed because winter's midnight was her long hour, her lamenting time. For her child, taken during some other winter's midnight, some other grim tolling.

Aimless, Rani walked the near-empty streets and wept. The wind hissed between the buildings--between the worlds--, reminding her too much of her son's murderer when he pressed his mouth against her ear. His blood-hot words had awaken her from sleep, only to bring her into a nightmare.

"Little Boy Blue asleep in the hay, blue-black bruises around his throat, never to wake another day."

And then his murderer had disappeared, literally, as if he'd walked through a door made of the air. But this fact didn't shock her, not after all the strange she'd witnessed and experienced. What had rattled her was that he was invisible, unknowable, invincible, and left no evidence behind, except a corpse in the crib.

Her son, her little Stephan.

Her little boy blue. By wringing, by strangulation.

Shock, sickness, agony, all overwhelming, crushing and as fresh as that night, she shrieked into the wind.

The homeless, lost in their own despair, ignored her, looking beyond her as if she were an apparition. Her wails were but the night wind howling through the alleys, sounds they'd long grown accustomed to.

Turning off Broadway, Rani left their haunted faces behind. If only it could be so easy, she thought, simply turning a corner to change her fate, but her life went from one bad direction to another. At the end of her road, only monsters ever waited.

26th Street seemed a different world, darker, colder, the realm of the dead perhaps, with its cemetery quiet and vapors. Steam hissed from the vents, rising from the subterranean tunnels like souls escaping from Hell. Warmth enveloped her. Like his warm hand on her mouth, his warm breath on her face.

Beneath her boots, the sidewalk squares became gravestone plaques, and every one bore her son's name, Stephan, in baby blue blood.

The clack, clack of her heels reminded her too much of his small bones breaking, crushed by the monster that still stalked the winter nights, and she stopped.

A black church loomed beside her.

Bells rung by the wind called her in for a blacker mass.

The red-lit stares in the courtyard belonged to the rats, but other things waited on the slate roof and watched with red-hot eyes, a hideous audience silently cheering for her to enter the church.

III.

They saw her without skin.

Beautiful, her raw meat of muscle, sinew, and fat, the tempting organs and bone hidden as if within wraps of scarlet and white silk.

Sweet, earthy, the odor of her aching womb drifted up toward them. Winds ripe with her scent wrapped around their heads, in memories of the daughters of men and their lithe legs parted and clasping. On their split tongues, the virginal taste of the daughters of men lingered still.

The smells of fornication dragged them into the unhallowed church, and, in the shadowy vaults of the ceiling, they prayed for the sacrifice of her body and her blood.

IV.

Rani opened the iron gate. The rusty hinges greeted her with a screech, and the rats scurried noisily across the pavement and into the storm drain. An eerie welcome.

The brown-black silhouette of the Gothic church was foreboding with its spires and tower. Over time, the stones had breathed Manhattan's polluted air and absorbed this necrotic hue, and, even though she restored historic architecture for a living, she decided she liked the untouched character of the church. An ominous, brooding relic of disrepair, a symbol of disintegrating faith.

Rounding the transept, she noted the nave's grisaille windows were intact. She reached and touched the glass, her fingertips gliding on cold darkness until faint buttery light flickered beneath her fingers.

Come to light, come to death murmured the voice within the stones. The voice of midnight and winter and murder.

Rani withdrew her trembling hand.

The stones snarled.

Behind her, the click of claws and feral growls of dogs.

She turned and gaped. These dogs were larger than wolves, with red-matted fur and red-glowing eyes. In their massive jaws, the beasts held skulls.

Misshapen, infantile skulls dripping blood and wailing as if with the voice of her dead son.

She screamed, and her screams silenced the phantom cries but not the laughter coming from the stones, from the shadows behind her.

Hands clasped the sides of her head and held her skull.

Smoky breath enveloped her, and her attacker whispered into her ear, "Where is your Little Boy Blue?"

Thumbnails pressed into her nape.

"His soul waits in darkness, in agony. He cries for you€“-don't you hear him crying for you?"

Yowling winds rushed upon her, and her son's cries echoed in the eaves, the terrified cry of his birth and his death. The wracked cry of her nightmares. The grim herald of the season of death, which had her wandering the streets at midnight.

Her tears fell in torrents.

"Come to light, come to death, and we will release his soul."

The vise of his hands vanished, and Rani was left standing alone, shaking, straining to follow the sound of his footfalls. But there was none, only his cold laughter in the dark stones.

As if listening to the calls of their master, the dogs turned ears to the winds and whined. They retreated into the streets with the skulls wailing between their jaws, sirens fading into the distance.

His soul waits in darkness, in agony.

The church groaned with the tones of anguished prayers as heavy walls settled on old foundation, and Rani felt drawn toward it. Toward the somber sighs of a dying heart.

Come to light, come to death.

Her heels hit hollow on the steps like hammers against empty skulls, like the sound of her dreams, where men built buildings from bone. The sepulchral sounds ushered her inside.

Inside, where a sanctuary of bodily incense, dim golden glows, and the sharp hymn of whips against flesh welcomed her.

Crimson drugget led from the vestibule to the black-velvet screen before the tribune. She walked up the aisle, feeling anxious as the thud-crack of whips intensified, feeling dread as the sensation of being watched descended upon her.

The central nave and radiating chapels were devoid of pews and people. Still, she felt prying eyes and searched the triforium, arcades, and ceiling, somehow believing something lurked in the arches, pillars, and vaults.

Only shadows cast from candlelight wavered along the intricate marble ceiling.

Shadows of dogs quarreling over bones.

Rani inhaled the strange odors of wax and wounds and burning myrrh.

Behind the screen, she spied their strange sources.

A black-vinyl-clad beauty tipped flaming candles over the naked woman kneeling on the steps in front of her, the red-hot wax streaming down and hardening like clotted blood on the ropes binding her wrists, her ankles, and her breasts. The tortured girl hissed for more.

Another woman, in stiletto boots and PVC gown, had her worshiper on his hands and knees, his bare ass rosy like communal wine. Others waited in breathless circles for their taste of her flogger.

At the altar, one man punished another servant of pain, while others masturbated to the rhythms of her cries.

Rani flinched with the swoosh and swap of the cane as it struck the woman's red-welted bottom.

Sweat, tears, and delirious bliss glistened on the woman's face, and her eyes were soft and unfocused, her sight seemingly turned inward on the enthralling ecstacy of pain. Anticipating the cane, she held her breath and swirled her hips slightly. Waiting and wanting...

The cane stung her flesh. Again and again, and her flesh sighed apart in red weeping lines.

And her rhythmic cries touched Rani, touched deep like groping fingers into her open sex.

Enthralled herself, Rani was unaware of the growing stench of burning myrrh and of the nearing presence of those who wore that stench as their perfume.

Unaware until blackish smoke lashed down onto the men.

Unaware until the men howled and crawled away from the altar like beaten dogs, their backs slathered with cuts spitting bloody froth and pus.

Unaware until the smoke became grotesque pillars of men and came onto her with talons and ripping teeth.

CHAPTER TWO:

...angel as you are, that insect lives in you too,
and will stir a tempest in your blood.
Tempests, because sensual lust is tempest€“-
worse than a tempest!
Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov

A pleasure so exquisite as almost to amount to pain.
Hunt, Letter to Alexander Ireland

Talons and ripping teeth.

Her skin, their canvas for splattering art.

Her body was hurled upon the altar and surrounded by things in the vestments of otherworldly flesh.

Hands, inhuman, maleficent, and scorching, burned upon Rani, and her clothes fell in ashes beneath her. Her skin reddened in deep degrees until blisters pearled and popped in rankled ooze. The unearthly men licked them with languid sighs.

Their tongues were hot velvet knives, cutting the curves of her breasts, splitting open her nipples. She screamed. Greedily the fallen fell upon her and lapped her blood.

"Milk," the myriad of unearthly mouths hummed.

"The milk of Asherah, the Mother of God and of the sons of God."

"The rich milk of her sweet, lurid womb and the waste she birthed."

Sickened by the sucking sounds of their blood-milking, Rani swooned into delirium, into ruddy darkness filled with wolves and the howling bones of the dead, where soft fetal bones harangued her for marrow and milk.

Unsavory, the taste of uterine water in her mouth. Salty and pissy.

Upon the ceiling, shadows moved like spiders on webs wove of tierceron ribs and rose tracery and dangled above their prey.

Waiting, wanting...

Wanting milk from her sweet lurid womb.

At once, she felt their sharp tongues upon her. Rani groaned, part in pain, part in desire, and tried in vain to twist from their grasp. Wings snapped at her side. Bony points of the feathers drove into her wrists, her ankles, all along her sides, pinning her. Crying, panting, she could nothing but endure their rage upon her.

Hands, hard as stones, hotter than flames, laid upon her body and into erotic places she'd never known existed. Mouths, lips and tongues made lascivious steam of her skin. Between her thighs, a nimbus-faced man lowered his head, mouth open, teeth and split-tongue poised for devouring.

In his eyes were blue lights. Blue and warm as the sunlit waters of the Caribbean Sea. Those eyes drew her into their depths as he drove his tongue deep into the depths of her.

Arching her back, Rani thrust her pelvis up and forward. Pushing into his face. Riding the pleasure waves his eyes bore into her. Drowning in this unbearable pleasure.

She convulsed in darkness, then light, her body aglow with heat. And then into darkness again. Nothing existed except the pulsing of her orgasm that threatened to shake her apart and destroy her.

Seconds seemed an eternity before she regained normal sense. She ached, her body reeking of blood and sweat, her mind reeling between heaven and hell.

The creatures from either heaven or hell stood around her, with white wings fanned and tattered, with skin blushed with the light of dawn, with melancholy faces bowed.

Madness, her mind shrieked as his withered face withdrew from her lap and regarded her with flaming eyes.

Star-bright eyes, peril eyes.

"We are the Grigori," she heard in the dreary song of their telepathic, celestial voices.

Unknown winds stirred from the sacristy, bringing the stale dust of the Eucharist and the mournful cries of infants.

"We come for our sons born and slaughtered."

Rani trembled in fear, for their faces suddenly stormed into turmoil, ashen ovals wet with tears made from lightning. The Grigori fashioned swords from their falling tears and brandished the bright blazing steel before her, pointing them at her eyes, mouth, and pubic mound.

"We come for our sons waiting and unmade."

Then she succumbed to another onslaught of vicious rapture.

Azure-burning hands spread her arms and legs, opening her body to them. Between her legs, her own heat warmed the air with wanton perfume. Star-bright eyes glowed brighter with hellish fires as the Grigori savored the scent of her arousal. And theirs, like jasmine, intoxicated her, giving her drunken hallucinations of Sodom, of lush bodies making ardent, adulterous love in the flowers and flames.

Swords gored into her sides and thighs.

Spears of their sublime genitals thrust into the blood-wet slit of her wounds.

Glorious pain, her body afire as if in the embrace of the sun. Burning in lust beyond human feeling. This must be Elysium, her mind and body sighed as the fallen angels ravaged her.

In her ear, one of the Grigori whispered his name, Shemyaza, and her raging heartbeat quivered into a murmur. Her breath silenced. Her womb though yearned for more than his voice inside her.

And this he knew and complied, ripping into her in one fell thrust, splitting her man-made cunt with his god-almighty cock.

Her eyes rolled back. Cold sweat mixed with the dew of the warm blood on her skin, making her body super slick on the altar. Rani slid into his thrusts. Crying out, she felt gutted as his huge cock rammed deeper than humanly possible, striking into the core of her body. Into the core of her soul.

Hyperventilating now with his fast and furious rhythm, she rode the fire-cracking fuck and swore she'd pass out from this awesome feeling building and building within her. It threatened. Rani wondered if her body would literally explode, all her juicy sex coming strewn apart and wet-spotting every inch of the walls. She convulsed again in darkness and light and darkness and orgasm.

Shemyaza withdrew from her, with his cock still twitching and spilling clouds of white upon her. Sweet warmth dribbled onto her mouth, and Rani tasted not only honey in his seed but Paradise.

But, in the aftertaste, came the bitterness of his exile from God's Kingdom, his punishment for fathering ogrish sons who devoured the men and beasts of earth.

As she lay shivering in shock and ambrosial satiety, the fallen angels licked her wounds, healing--arousing--the flesh again, sealing them without the trace of even the faintest silvery scar.

Rising on the altar, she sat as if on a throne, her imperial guards at her sides, her subjects fawning.

Shemyaza placed his flaming fingers against her forehead. His perilous eyes bore into her.

"We are the Watchers."

"We are the Keepers."

Candlelight faded flame by flame. The Grigori disappeared into the darkness, the hint of burning myrrh left behind, but Rani felt them from afar, watching, waiting, wanting.

And she knew they were watching for signs of sons growing within her.

CHAPTER THREE:

The boundaries which divide Life from Death are
at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the
one ends, and where the other begins?
Poe, The Premature Burial

I.

Her son's corpse hung from the branches of the ash.

"I charge thee, I conjure thee, I command thee, on pain of the torments and wandering of thrice seven years, which I, by force of magic rites, have power to inflict upon thee, by the sights and groans I conjure thee to utter thy voice."

Creak of tree bough shuddering; the wind soughing through snow; the strangled mewling of an infant.

"I conjure thee utter thy most sonorous, woeful voice! Thy mother cannot hear thee yet..."

The man made small cuts in the corpse, a star upon death-dappled flesh, and Stephan's dead gray body, awakened by the knife and the spell, stretched wide its worm-riddled mouth. Loud, horrible, haunting, its cry resounded through the woods and carried far upon the icy winds.

Its sunken, milky eyes wept black tears.

Louder, more pained, it cried for the comfort only its mother could bring.

II.

Midnight ended with his cries.

The wind pushed his cries against her, into her breath, into her blood, where the anguish wrenched her apart from the inside. Her heart felt crushed and twisted. Every beat, every breath was a struggle, and Rani didn't feel like fighting.

She wanted to lie down and die.

But she kept hearing the loathsome voice say, Come to light, come to death, and we will release him.

His soul waits in darkness, in agony.

The Grigori waited in darkness as well, waiting for their dead sons to come back to life. Would that happen to Stephan? Would he come back to her?

"Why not?" she asked the weeping winds, pulling the borrowed coat tighter around her nakedness. It made bizarre sense€“-someone had him to release him.

Standing on the street corner, she raised her arms and opened them to embrace the wind, to embrace his cries.

"Come to Mama..."

Her voice broke into sobs. God, this awful emptiness she held instead of her son.

Ice on the storefront awning shattered with his terrible, needful cry.

Right now, more than anything, she needed the voice of her son's murderer to tell her what to do. She would do anything to put an end to the nightmare of midnights.

III.

He removed the corpse from the branches and dropped it unceremoniously to the ground, where it landed on hard-packed snow with a gross thud of bones and rot and a wretched squeak.

Climbing down from the tree, he pulled a large black cloth from his bag and laid it on the ground next to the corpse. He lifted the dead, flailing baby and placed it on the rectangle of funeral fabric.

Waxy, unblinking eyes stared at him. Years ago, the blue of the irises had faded throughout the whites of the eyes, and now it was like staring into balls of bluish ice. But the eyes were not cold like ice; they were very much heated with feeling.

Especially with fear.

"Thee, Stephan Izhar, whom I have formed from chaos are mine to do as I will. By the power of the Prince of darkness, I, master of Magic, confine thee, Stephan Izhar, by this shroud."

He folded the cloth over the head.

"As my magic will confine thy life in death..."

He folded the cloth over the legs.

"Thus will thee, Stephan Izhar, return to the blackness..."

He folded the cloth over the right side of the body.

"From whence thy came..."

He folded the remaining segment of cloth over the left side of the body. No shred of the dead's gray, only the black of the cloth, the black of death.

"By my power I hold thee, bound by my will."

He put the swaddled infant into a box, which stank of river and decay, snapped the padlock, and lowered the box back into its shallow grave.

"By my power I hold thee in darkness, bound by the will of the Brotherhood."

Shoveling the dirt upon the box, he smiled.

The Brotherhood.

His Brotherhood.

His brothers who would die without question, without delay for the Order; his brothers who would kill without hesitation.

His brothers, who waited for her to help build them a Higher Order.

"Come to light," he said and in the dying fire spied her image and stuck his knife through the heart of the red-orange flame. "Come to death."

Her eyes went to ashes and her lips went to deep red flame.

The face of a painted harlot, of Jezebel who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling God's servants to practice fornication.

Worse than Jezebel, she calls the angels down to fornicate.

He stomped out the fire, snuffing the image of her face, and laughed, for the prophets of God are called to destroy all the Jezebels.

And then they will cut open her body and steal the thirty Keys of power from her vile organs and bones, and call the angels down themselves for rightful purposes.

The Brotherhood will not suffer a woman to have sluttish control over the Divine.

But she will suffer.

Yes, indeed, he thought as he walked through the darkened woods, in the unseen company of darker things.