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Post By The Hooded Hood notes we need two more stories before midnight Tue Jan 30, 2007 at 05:24:22 pm EST |
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Obscure Parodyverse Moments #9: The Black Chapel | |
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| Obscure Parodyverse Moments #9: The Black Chapel This story continues from Obscure Parodyverse Moments #7: Amnesia and Obscure Parodyverse Moments #8: Monsters on the Loose  The Black Chapel was old, a stone rectangle with a beehive-vaulted roof. The walls were unpainted. Three high window-slits allowed thin shafts of light down onto the flagstoned floor. The sound and smell of a low tide permeated the damp chamber.There were nine monks there, including Father Abbot. They were standing in an uncertain circle around a tenth figure, a man wrapped in heavy chains to prevent his thrashing, gagged with hessian to stifle his screams. Some of the brothers looked uncertain. One had vomited on the floor. The exorcism had not gone well. The monster loomed out of the shadows by the altar. The monks saw him, that vast shaggy beast carrying a ragged body in his huge claws. They panicked and ran. Except for Father Abbot. He simply watched the beast with cold blue eyes. Then Father Abbot faded away. The chained man vanished with him. Ghosts, thought the monster. Nothing but echoes. This place is full of them. The creature paused, startled at the coherent thought. A reasoned statement, language, continuity of intellect seemed strange to him after so long. He struggled with the why of it. He noticed the limp girl in her arms. He didn’t know her. He didn’t know himself. He had no idea what had been done to him. He vaguely remembered what had been going to happen to her, and his rage at it. The monster probed his memories, sad ragged tattered things that they were, for his name. It lay there just out of reach. The girl shifted in his arms. She was alive then, despite the blood on her face where she’d been struck, the grazes on her arms and legs where she’d struggled against the brutal men in that prison beyond. The monster flinched as she opened her eyes and looked at him. “Oh,” she said. Not a scream. Not a sob. Merely acceptance. The great beast sat her gently on the alter like a holy offering and slowly backed away. She looked at him, her head tilted a little to one side. “So you’re my monster,” she said simply. The beast lowered he head in acknowledgement. It was somehow true. He was her monster. “Are you real?” The creature didn’t know. He looked uncertainly round the chapel. There were two other doors beyond the one he’d come through, but neither of them was large enough for him to pass. “Can you speak?” That was an interesting question. The creature felt an answer well up in his throat, but for some reason he suppressed it. He compromised with a half-shrug. The girl slid off the alter, found her feet, and took a step towards him. “Can you understand me, at least? Do you have intellect?” Again an uncertain shrug. It was hard to mime sometimes. But the more he spoke with the girl, the more the thoughts seethed inside the monster. It felt right to be near her. “Are you hurt?” The human was looking at his matted fur now, the clotted tufts about his right forearm where the pistol ball had gone when the monster had broken into the asylum. It pained him because the ball was still in there, grating as he moved. The huge beast backed away as the girl approached him. “Don’t be afraid,” she told him, absurdly. The monster could tear her head off in one motion. “I’m going to help you.” She tore a dangling strip off the stained tabard she wore and dabbed at the blood on the monster’s arm. “I think the bullet’s still in there. I’m going to have to get it out with my nails. It’s going to hurt.” She swallowed and looked up into the beast’s watery yellow eyes. “Please don’t kill me.” The creature gritted its considerable teeth and submitted to having his wound searched. A gory lead ball clattered to the floor. And vanished. The Black Chapel liked blood. “All done,” the girl assured him, dabbing the fresh-flowing wound with more of her diminishing dress. “Let it heal now.” It was healing. The creature could feel it closing, where it hadn’t before. The girl’s presence made the difference. Except the girl was now looking at the door. “We need to go now,” she told the beast. “They’ll be looking for us. If they find us they’ll kill you and take me back. And there’s a man… another prisoner. They were torturing him, I think. We have to help him too.” The creature felt a surge of jealously. He’d seen the man - pale, spindly, laced with old scars - and disliked him at once. There was something about the inmate; something that scared the monster. “Come on,” the girl said. She never seemed to question whether the monster would follow her. She heaved open the big chapel door and peered outside. She’d been half-unconscious when she’d been carried to the Black Chapel. She didn’t notice that the corridor had changed. The stones of these walls were rougher, less regular. The eye-watering gas mantles had been replaced by burning torches in iron sconces. There was a faint smell of stale incense. Somewhere a bell was tolling. “I feel I should introduce myself,” the girl whispered as she led the way down the passage. Her bare feet padded on rough cobbles and straw. “The problem is I don’t actually know who I am either, or how I got here. Amnesia is the only name I’ve got for now.” She peered down into a larger room. Rough wooden trestles and benches filled the centre of a crude hall. A long fireplace lined one wall. “Amnesia. That’s why the locked me in this asylum,” the girl continued. She was holding the monster’s hand like a child and her teddy bear. It was absurd. “Well, also because I kept seeing a monster,” she confessed. “You.” They moved cautiously across the hall. The monster could smell rotting flesh and congealed blood. There had been slaughter here. Humans had died. Amnesia shrieked when she almost tripped over the first corpse. She quickly muffled her outcry as she backed off, bumping into her monster. The monks were here. Eight of them, all dead. They hadn’t died peacefully. “Did you do this?” Amnesia asked the monster in a trembling voice. He shook his head, hoping he wasn’t lying. He didn’t remember attacking the holy men. The wounds were savage but more likely to have been inflicted by a human. But the bodies were partially stripped of their flesh… I would have torn off larger strips than that, the monster assured himself. The thing that ate these was smaller than me. Smaller jaws. About the size of a mortal. He found that it was a relief to reason that out. “What happened to them?” Amnesia wondered. Another thought occurred. “We have to get out of there. They’ll think it was us!” Whatever did this might still be around, the beast thought. The great door at the hall’s end was only barred and bolted, but neither Amnesia not the beast were able to drag the beam or bolts loose. They needed another escape. One low archway led to a scullery and pantries. A rough spiral stair that the creature couldn’t negotiate led to a dortoir. Amnesia was just peering through another door into a scriptorium when a sound echoed from the other uninvestigated arch beyond the fireplace. A whiplash. A scream. Amnesia paled. Her face turned to the monster. “We have to look,” she whispered. Beast and beauty crept to the stairs. An iron gate was not quite closed. It creaked a little as they pushed it aside. Amnesia winced. More sounds came from below. More than one voice, chanting a Latin liturgy. The hiss of hot metal on human flesh. Another scream. In the dim light of tallow candles the brothers were clustered around the man on the punishment frame. Father Abbot was applying holy fire and the lash. The other monks prayed for the possessed man’s soul. The subject of their ministrations writhed as they tortured the demons within. “I know him!” Amnesia gasped as she saw the thin naked figure stretched on the rack. “That’s the one I was with. The one who took care of me! The one I kissed!” The beast felt another surge of jealously spike through him. He wondered why, even as he realised that he was not prepared to share the girl with anybody. She was his, his alone. His place. His home. His home ran from the cover of the water-butts and rushed to stop the victim’s torments. “No! Leave off! Let him alone!” Abruptly the tableau vanished. The images shimmered to nothing, leaving the cellar dark and deserted; except that Father Abbot turned to look at her before he was gone. “Where are they?” Amnesia shrieked. “Oh, I think I really am going mad! Where did they go?” “Ghosts,” whispered the monster, and was surprised when the word came from his lips. Amnesia turned in wonder. “You spoke? You can talk, after all?” “Yes.” A low growl of a whisper, at least. More would be… bad, the monster sensed. More would kill. “Then who are you? What are you?” “I don’t remember,” confessed the beast. “Like you.” Amnesia pursed her lips. “This is too perverse,” she scowled. “Somebody is having a joke on us. A black, cruel joke.” She looked back at the darkened punishment pit. “Ghosts, really?” The creature nodded. Amnesia took a torch and they explored the rest of that cellar. There were thirty cells with metal gates, no alcove higher nor deeper than four feet. Every one had a gibbering madman or woman inside them. Filthy, naked, shrieking, frothing, they reached blackened talons through the bars in supplication. Every one of them faded away when the light came too near. “What is this place?” Amnesia asked in despair. “Why torture these poor devils so?” There were tears in her eyes at their sufferings. “The scriptorium?” suggested the monster. “There is wisdom in books.” They beat a welcome retreat from the oppressive echo-filled ghost-haunted darkness of the lunatic vaults and found their way back to the hall and the library beyond. The scriptorium was the first light room they’d found, a long thin chamber with south-facing windows. The shutters were back and the unglazed arches revealed a bleak grass-duned wilderness beyond. No more than sixty yards away the churning sea broke upon a jagged rocky shore. “This asylum is on an island,” Amnesia remembered. She’d smelled the ocean and heard the gulls from inside the closed carriage that had brought her to her torments. But there hadn’t been a ferry. So perhaps this was a peninsula and escape was still possible? “Listen,” urged the beast, laying a cautious paw on her arm. She tried not to wince. There were other whispers, older echoes not in the monster’s gruff gutturals, snatches of voices and plainsong from long ago. Amnesia strained to catch them. They were so faint that even the sound of the wind could drown them out. “This cannot be the will of the Lord!” “This place has echoes that never stop. Never.” “You will yield your secrets to me, captive. Your power will be mine.” “It is my will, and that is enough.” “There has always been a mystery here. Ask no more.” “Three hundred years confined in these cells, yet still he lives and breathes.” “Your role is not to question, brother, only to obey!” “The stones are old. They were old when they were first rebuilt into this house.” “Demons of the mind must be caged and tamed, like any other.” “He’s loose! Flee for your lives! The madman has escaped!” There was a crash from the cellars that startled Amnesia and her beast alike. They turned in response and the voices stopped. “What was that?” Amnesia asked in a frightened voice. She was starting to appreciate the different textures of horror. The dread that overwhelmed her now was different from the anticipation of being hurt by sadistic jailers, from the loneliness of the dark, from being chased by a monster, from witnessing ghosts. Something else was happening. Something worse. “That is your death,” Father Abbot told her. He was standing right behind her, over her left shoulder. He seemed pleased. Amnesia span around, pressing away. Her monster was nowhere to be seen. The scriptorium was bare now, empty of tables and easels and scrolls and ink. A grey mat of rotting leaves clogged the floors. Only the Abbot filled the room. “W-who are you?” Amnesia demanded of the cleric. “What’s going on? Where’s my monster?” “Which one?” Father Abbot asked her. Amnesia turned to flee but he caught her wrist in a cold tight grip. “You’re going to die here,” he promised her. “You’re going to join the ghosts.” Amnesia shifted her weight, dragged his arm forward, and planted an elbow in the monk’s stomach then a palm under his chin. He released her as he toppled back in an undignified sprawl. She stamped down between his legs but her foot passed through nothing. Father Abbot was gone. Except his voice. “The madman has escaped,” he said. “He has slaughtered the holy men who tended him for so long. Slaughtered them and eaten them. But he is still hungry.” Then silence. Amnesia realised it had grown dark outside, suddenly dark. Beyond the windows a huge full moon shone over the turbulent icy sea. It was bitter cold. Amnesia’s breath fogged around her. She heard a scraping sound from the hall outside. Bodies were being shifted. She heard a sloppy ripping noise. Something wet tore apart. She heard soft padding footsteps and a jangle of broken chain coming towards the scriptorium door. Amnesia wanted to scream. She wanted to call for her monster, her terrible comforting beast, but she was afraid that would only seal her doom. She looked for cover, but only the rotting piles of leaves filled the desolate chamber. The decaying door fell from its hinges and shattered to splinters on the floor. The madman entered to room, a great bloody knife in his hand, his jaws red with human pulp. Amnesia had kissed those bloody lips. The madman saw her, laughed, and tested the edge of his knife. It was supper time. Continued in The Cabinet of Doctor Morningstar Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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