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Standing, staring at the forest’s edge, I am oddly reluctant to enter this primeval land. I draw my coat about me in a vain attempt to forbid entry to the graveyard’s chill. Glancing over my shoulder, I see the spectral outlines of gravestones against the waning moon; beyond, my taxi disappears into the darkness’ womb.
Pausing a moment further to gather myself, I step resolutely forward into the unknown; from my future into my past. Immediately, a stream of stinking bats explode wraithlike past my head, fanged mouths open in silent screams as, shuddering, I prepare for my eternal doom
Paleness trickles through the gnarled and twisted branches interlocked above; twisted together like the fingers of a supplicant’s pleading hands. Festoons of Old Man’s Beard dribble from the limbs, reflecting the tarnished silver moonbeams, broken and gloomed.
Somewhere, water drips slowly like fresh blood with a soft, thick, velvet boom.
The dark earth exudes an unwholesome miasma, cloying and moist, never quite still, suggesting that there are things as yet undead beneath. The very night air itself seems menacing, and little light reaches the forest floor, where sounds of scurrying can almost be heard in this ghostly room.
As I listen to the inky blackness, cocking my head first to one side, then the other, rustling whispers insinuate themselves into my ear, caressing my mind, stroking, inviting; hypnotic and irresistible, my soul to entomb.
“Come…come…come to us, grandfather.” “ Kneel before us.” “We have been waiting for so long.” “We hunger, hunger, hunger.”
More disembodied voices, swelling, growing, chanting, becoming more insistent, take up the whisper, occult mind-weavers toiling on my cerebral loom.
“Hunger, hunger, hunger.” “Hunger, hunger, hunger.” “Hunger, hunger, hunger.”
I feel the clammy ooze seeping through the knees of my trousers, and realise that I do not remember kneeling. I see nothing, as my head is bowed to my chest, eyes closed, and I am theirs now, they assume.
I still my breathing and hear a faint sound, as if many small, naked feet are carefully shuffling through the obscene leaf mould toward me. Without lifting my head, I open my eyes and see before me two tiny feet, soiled and dirty as any witch’s broom.
My arms snake out swiftly, grasping thin arms in my powerful hands, and as I raise my head my lipless mouth slides into a sardonic smile, rows of pointed yellow teeth gleaming like putrid ivory. The band of Nightchildren stands perfectly still, unsmiling now, in my power marooned.
Drawing the first child to me, I tear off the top of its pathetic head, and, raising the body like some arcane chalice, gulp down the thick waterfall of bloody spume.
In a voice old and unused, rasping and creaking, yet slowly becoming as soft as wet, new flesh, I ask, “ Who will come to their Grandfather next?”
“Whom?”
John Irvine ©
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