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[ruinousrealms]

Flayer

It was half past nightfall when we crossed the Rio Nuevo into Las Verdantes. Our outfit was fifteen men strong, pushing half a thousand cattle for Erlen Baymer, one of the state's lesser cattlemen. In truth he was a hard boss, a hard man who had captained a company of border raiders during the war and never tired of bragging about his service. 

A favorite story of his was the time he and his men came across a family of free black farmers in southern Kansas. Baymer had approached on horseback, riding through the fields with the self-confident swagger of a plantation overlord surveying his property. He asked the father whose plantation he had run away from, and for response the black said he had been born free. 

Now, Erlen Baymer was a devout Christian, and he knew the black race were descendants of Ham, son of Noah, and that for his transgression against God, he and his descendants were evermore cursed to servitude, to hew wood and draw water and be servants unto servants. He did of course explain this position to the black, as he ordered his men to strip him naked to find the truth of his claims. No man is born into slavery but he feels the whip, and so if he were born free, his back should be free from blemish. 

Indeed, the man's back was smooth, free from the lumpy scars of the lash. A novelty, many of his company had come up to gawk and ask questions. How did the negro know what to plant and when without any white man to tell him? How did he work the fields without a lash to urge his lazy, indolent soul? 

At length Captain Baymer ended this game and pronounced the sentence. The man was to be hung for his crimes against the Confederate States of America, those crimes being largely related to the color of his skin and the manner of his livelihood. It was understood that, if he were truly a born freeman, then surely his father and mother were somebody’s escaped property. Thus his very existence constituted the crime of theft. The children were brought back to Tennessee and dispersed among the slave markets.

The freeman’s remarkable back, Erlen Baymer had a leathersmith tan it and stitch it into a saddle. He rode that very saddle, decked out in silver dollar conchos and a rebel flag tied round the post, when we crossed the river that night in 1868.

Now, the facts of that night - I’m going to relate them to you here, plain and simple and just as they happened, like I’m some fancy New York journalist-reporter type. I grant you some of what I’m about to say may seem unbelievable. Well, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t got any proof, any evidence beyond what I saw that night with my own two eyes. The way Erlen Baymer died, and the things that happened to us in his trail crew before and after… I tell you boy, it’s a curse, the things I seen with these eyes. It’s what drives a man to whiskey.

The country there was flat as flapjacks, and the only place we could find to camp out of the wind was in a dried up riverbank. There we laid out our beds, cocooning ourselves in canvas sheets and wool blankets and shivering in the chill night air. The southwestern desert is hotter than a griddle all day long, but come nightfall and it’s as cold as the north pole.

Well, it was cold that night, like I said, and the wind was howling and kicking up a whole storm of dust. Me and some of the boys, those being Joe Merwin and Caul Bretton and Micah Sanchez, we took turns digging a hole in the side of the riverbank. It wasn’t like a cave, just a dirt overhang a few feet deep, with the excavated dirt piled up to protect our side from the wind.

I wouldn’t say it was the hole we dug that saved us. It sure didn’t save poor Caul, and from what I hear Micah’s still out of his mind up at one of those New England asylums. I’d say it kept us from getting noticed long enough to save our lives, for whatever that's worth.

Now we’d been seeing the makings of a dust storm in the distance for most of the afternoon. They’re common enough out here and we didn’t make much of it beyond what we’d have to do to keep the cattle from scattering. A herd of dumb heifers can scatter to the four winds during a dust-up if you’re not careful with where you lay them down.

The cows stretched out for more than a mile down the riverbed, but they wouldn’t bed down quietly. Whips of dust kept kicking up and no sooner had they sat down than they were on their hooves again, bellowing out loud.

Erlen Baymer kept riding up and down the line cursing to high heaven, kicking the sentries when he came upon them and telling them to get off their lazy god damned bean-eating asses and put the god damned cows to god damned sleep. The only effect that had was making it impossible for any of us to get sleep - But that probably saved us.

It was so dusty at that point that when dark fell there wasn’t a moon nor a star to be seen. A man could just see the dots of cattle guards’ lanterns like the windows of distant farmsteads. Weren’t no use keeping your eyes open, the wind kept kicking the stinging dust up and there weren’t anything to see anyways. I pulled my bandana up over my nose and pushed the brim of my hat down over my eyes and tried to get some shuteye.

I might even have caught a wink of sleep. The cattle down at the far end of the line were getting riled up, bellowing and braying into the night, and that got the whole herd nervous. A nervous longhorner is a dangerous longhorner, and a whole herd of nervous longhorners is a stampede waiting to happen. Joe Merwin went out to see what was the matter and lend a hand if need be. That left just the three of us.

The screaming started soon after. I think it was Tadd Murfree, but from the sound it was hard to tell whose voice it was. There are sounds and intonations particular to men and sounds and intonations particular to animals, and only in the extremity of fear, agony or ecstasy can one make the sounds of another. I don’t think poor Tadd was in ecstasy that night.

More screams started up, and the horses neighing, and the braying and bellowing filled the night air with a mad cacophony. I wager nobody’s ever heard a sound like that before, that of half a thousand screaming and panicking cattle. The hoofbeats were like thunder, like cannonfire, like a thousand drummers pounding madly out of time.

The three of us huddled at the back of our shallow hole in the edge of the riverbank, wishing we’d dug in even deeper and almost thankful Joe Merwin wasn’t here, because he was a big man and there wouldn’t have been room to hide.

I had a small trail lantern whose flickering light we used to play cards. It took five tries to get a match lit, my hands were shaking so much. It lit up our little hole just fine; I saw Micah had his revolver out, and his knuckles were white around the oakwood grip.

“Put that thing away, Micah, do you mean to shoot something?”

“I intend to be ready,” He said, which was reasonable enough.

I crawled to the entrance of the hole. As we were digging we piled the dirt up at the entrance to serve as a wind-break while we slept. I crawled up to it like a trench’s parapet and peered over with my little lamp. It didn’t illuminate much, but in its glow I could see a rush of cattle, a torrent of bovinity running full-tilt down the length of the riverbed. A lot of the animals had raw bloody wounds, some so flayed they appeared to be covered in red patches like a hellishly perverse Holstein.

These animals were panicking for a reason, fleeing some unknown predator, but what on God’s earth it could be I had no idea. Suddenly a cow fell headlong into the side of the embankment near us, sending a shower of dirt down from the roof of our little dugout. It kept trying to get up, but couldn’t; And when it rolled over I could see one whole side of its hip had been laid open and the bloody pink bone was visible. Well, I put the poor bellowing beast out of its misery and hurled my dinner over the side of the dirt heap.

And you see, that’s when Erlen Baymer rode past us. God, if the sight don’t haunt me. I once seen a drawing of the Third Horseman, Famine, a rotting man riding atop a rotting stallion. That’s what I saw. That’s the scene I’ve got to describe to you, to make you understand why I can’t sleep at night no more.

The horse looked like it had been dead and rotting for a week. It had hardly a hair of fur left on its body, and the skin… It looked like somebody had taken a cheese grater to the poor beast. Through flapping bits of flesh I saw muscles moving like an accursed anatomical flipbook. The horse’s jaw was hanging on by a thread of tendon and it was screaming, just screaming with that stump of a tongue hanging out.

The poor girl had been beautiful, just absolutely beautiful, with a black coat that shone like oil in the sunlight. Thinking back on it now I wish I’d have drawn my pistol and put an end to the poor thing, but at the time I was too shocked to do anything but watch as it thundered past, carrying its shrieking, flailing load.

Erlen Baymer was naked as Adam in Eden, and it was plain whatever was happening to the horse was occurring to him as well. He was flailing like a man possessed, slapping at himself as if desperately beating out flames; There were no flames, just raw red meat that spurted every time he touched it. He raised his arm and I caught a glimpse of the frayed ends of muscles poking through a bicep.

Something fell with a wet thud near our little hollow, and leaning over just slightly with the lantern, I saw a withered human leg severed at the knee, as if the joint had been so weakened it simply fell off. It seemed to be writhing as if covered by a hundred thousand ravenous little insects, methodically stripping it down to the bone before my very eyes. It was wearing one of Erlen Baymer’s fancy gatorskin ropers. Once the flesh was gone, the carnivorous beasties went to work eating the leather of the boot, anything fleshy enough to be consumed, till all that remained were bones and a silver spur.

I crawled back in the hole, barely able to process what I had just seen. “Alright, boys, what in the hell do we do?” I asked, and Micah Sanchez said what we three all were thinking - Make a run for the horses.

Well, you didn’t have to tell us twice. We three all crawled up to the opening, and Micah and Caul took off at a full tilt. I stayed behind a second - I’d just glanced at the body of the cow beside our dugout. It had been picked to the bone.

Just as I scrambled to my feet, Caul fell and started screaming.

“No! God, no!” Caul frantically started beating at the lower hem of his pant-legs. We didn’t know what in the hell was happening; Micah rushed over with the lamp and pulled up his trouser leg. Micah screamed and dropped the lantern, bringing the infernal night down around us once more. Caul let out a kind of a long drawn-out moan, with notes of fear, sadness and resignation. At the time what it reminded me of, more than anything, was a deer that’s gotten itself trapped in some crevasse it can’t get out, and the more it struggles the more stuck it gets, till it’s exhausted itself and all it can do is bray and wait to die.

A gunshot lit up the darkness for a moment, and the afterimage stayed in my eyes for a long time, like looking too long into a fire. Caul’s body slumped down almost casually, but the upper part of his head sprayed across the sand. I heard Micah’s running footsteps and his heavy gasping breath, and he thudded down next to me and skittered like a rat into our little safe haven.

“Flies!” Micah’s fingertips dug into my shoulders like blades, his dirty breath blowing in my face, “It’s flies! Must be millions of them! They were eating him right up! Cleaned his ankles down to the bone, I’m telling you!”

I told him to shut up.

“That’s why he fell, there weren’t nothing holding his foot bones to his leg!”

Maybe the reader will judge me for what I did next. I hope you’ll take into account the things I’d seen, and the stress I was under at the time. Micah was raving mad, clenching me for dear life like a survivor of a shipwreck clinging to a broken mast. I’d just seen him blow a man’s brains out - Though thinking back to it, he may have been right. It would have been cruel to leave him to be eaten alive, and if Micah had tried dragging him back, he’d have brought the carnivorous flies with him. He put him out of his misery as you would an old cow. But at that time I was still in shock, and the only thought that came to mind was of Caul Bretten, whom I hardly knew, but with whom I’d shared campfires and kettles of coffee, and whose brains were steaming in the cool desert night.

Thinking only of justice, I reached for my lantern and brought it down on Micah’s head, extinguishing the light and silencing his ramblings. I didn’t know whether or not I’d killed him. He was quiet. We lay there together a long time. I must have nodded off and woken several times. At one point, I woke to see Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address in the corner of our cave. Again I woke, this time to see a skinless and eyeless cow wandering blind in the dim pre-dawn light. It walked past absolutely silently.

When morning came, the desert was still and not a thing moved. The sun was well up in the sky before I dared move. I was caked in dust from head to toe, cracking and falling as I stirred.

Micah’s face was red and my first thought, as the events of the night came rushing back to me, was that he too was being consumed alive by those unstoppably ravenous insects. But no; My lantern blow had split his scalp and dry blood painted his face red as an Apache warrior. He was still breathing softly, so I left him there and took a gander outside.

The dry riverbed at first seemed to be decorated with a vast elaborate network of ice sculptures, gleaming a blinding white in the sun. These were the bones of cattle and cattlemen, five hundred dead heifers stripped of skin and meat and life. A lot of them had broken and ran, and their bones shone white in the distant desert sand. Clambering up the slope, the impression one got was of an overflowing river turned to ice in the blink of an eye, as if by magic.

Here and there the bones of the sentries. I recognized Eustace Bagge from his cigarette case. The leather had been eaten away, but the copper badge bearing the name of the regiment he served in the war was still perfect.

Two or three miles down, laying near some scrub was the skeleton of a horse surrounded by silver dollar conchos. I picked one up, turned it over; It could only be Erlen Baymer’s horse and saddle. The saddle, however, was gone but for the metal pegs that held it together. The freedman’s dark skin, that nightmarish piece of leatherwork, had been completely eaten away by the swarm.

The man himself had crawled away from his dead horse and left a trail of bones. He lost a lot more than the one leg; Toe and finger bones poked from the sand like pebbles, and the larger ones, a femur, most of a hand and the arm up to the elbow. I found gold teeth, and his revolver with the tacks that had held together the holster.

A bit further on I found Erlen Baymer. I turned and went back down the riverbank.

Micah had woken up and I found him wandering dazed and confused amongst the skeletons. I spoke to him but he didn’t reply; He never said a word to me again, and from what I’ve heard those New England brain-doctors haven’t gotten him talking. There was something wrong with his eyes. I couldn’t tell you what. He just kept staring past me.

He followed me without resistance. We followed the riverbed. We must have walked ten miles the first day and ten miles the next. The whole time we were stepping around skeletons. A herd can go surprisingly far in panic; The only reason they hadn’t gotten farther was, well, they were being eaten alive at the time.

The sun was our enemy. We had our canteens; I kept pouring little slips down Micah’s mouth, worried he’d choke but even more worried he’d die of thirst. At some point the brim started falling off my hat and letting sunlight hit my forehead, searing the skin red and raw.

Round noon of the third day, we came to an old covered bridge where we took shelter from the sun for a while, then started out along the road. After two and a half days walking, we were near dead. I had to pull Micah along, but he’d only move at a snail’s pace. I was terrified that he’d eventually fall down and just refuse to get back up; It’d be the end for him, and my own couldn’t be far away.

And then, as if by magic, a carriage appeared. One moment we were walking and then, the sound and smell of horses and a voice crying out in Spanish, “Quitate de en medio, idiotas!”

Well, I spoke a peck of Spanish, just enough for him to understand that we were in trouble, and the kind old man stepped down and helped me load Micah into the back, building a little bed for him out of bags of corn, and setting up a tarp to keep him out of the sun.

We rode to a hacienda named Soledad El Aquelarre, and the women bathed us and fed us and fussed over poor Micah. There was a nunnery not far away and the old man sent for the holy sisters to tend his needs, but beyond keeping him fed and cleaning up after him, there was little they could do.

I never told him a word of what happened. My lack of Spanish helped in that respect; Whenever he asked, I could pretend not to understand. He was kind, too kind for the likes of us, and I do feel guilty about lying to him, but I didn’t think he could comprehend what we’d been through, let alone understand. I barely could, and as I lay there day after day I got to wondering if the whole thing hadn’t been some sort of insane dream. I could see the workers in the fields through my window and beyond them the bone white desert stretched out gleaming, a thousand miles of dust to the gulf of Mexico.

One night, however, I was visited in my room by one of the sisters. She spoke good English and introduced herself as Sister Clarita. She was one of the sisters tending to Micah. She didn’t ask me what had happened, because she already knew. There were stories in this region going back centuries, of caravans going missing in the desert night, and by light of day all that are found are the polished white bones. The monastery library held many such reports going back to the days of the conquistadors. Sister Clarita thought it must have been going on a lot longer; The native tribes shunned this entire area, considering it an unclean place to visit and avoiding the entire hundred-mile stretch of desert as we Americans avoid the cesspit or the slums.

There were other books, too. Books on biology and entomology, and the evolution and adaptation of species. Sister Clarita suggested that a species of small insect, like the tiny mites and fleas that live among grains of sand and are so small as to be almost indistinguishable, may have become adapted, over many centuries, to the consumption of flesh. That such a diet would cause changes in the bodies of the insects making them more adept at catching their prey; Perhaps their mandibles had developed a razor’s edge for slicing off bits of flesh. Or maybe they coated their victims in digestive acid and slurped up the liquified flesh. Sister Clarita knew of several insects that consumed their prey in just such a manner, though none that she knew had ever gone after so large a prey as a man or a cow.

“But Sister, if these really are man-eating insects, why do they stay out here in the desert? Every animal migrates toward its food source; These things could strip a town clean of flesh overnight! Why aren’t they swarming through the cities, just… Everywhere?”

“Perhaps they just like the weather here,” Sister Clarita said and kissed her rosary.

After a week of recovery, I felt well enough to travel. I collected Micah from the sisters, who protested, but I thought if anyone could help him it would be at one of those new asylums up in New England. The old man took us as far as the train station in Las Friolero del Resol, and there he bade us goodbye.

Two days later we were back in Texas. First thing I went to the barber to shave off the wild beard I’d grown. Then I walked into the nearest sheriff’s office to report the fate of the Erlen Baymer Cattle Drive.

Well, they didn’t believe a word of what I told them and locked me and Micah up for murder. To hear them tell it, the two of us got up one night and slit everybody’s throats. Didn’t matter to them what I said, nor the state Micah was in; They left us to rot six weeks before the circuit judge came ‘round to pronounce the sentence.

He had expected an open-and-shut murder case; When we were brought to stand before him, he saw my sleepless eyes and the empty shell of a man that was Micah. He listened to my story silently, nodding occasionally for me to continue, and when it was done he pronounced the sentence.

“I, Judge Howard Lorbbock of the Great State of Texas, do hereby declare these two men to be mentally insane. No doubt they were driven mad by the ordeal they suffered, of crossing the desert after their cattle drive was destroyed by Apaches.”

There weren’t any damn Apaches in that part of Mexico, but I kept my mouth shut. The sheriff was making enough noise as it was, imploring the judge that “What the people of this town need to see is a good old fashioned hanging!”

Well, we were sent to Houston for treatment. Micah was considered such a specialty case that he was sent up north to New England, to the asylum in some town called Arkham. 

I stayed behind at the Houston madhouse. The medicine they gave me made me sleep, but nothing can stop the dreams. When I close my eyes, all I can see are Erlen Baymer’s lidless eyeballs rolling round and round in his red skull-face.

[ruinousrealms]

Adrift, A Dramatic Poem

Captain Karnatian heard a knock on the other side of his cabin door. He grunted, opening bleary, salt-stung eyes, and stared at the door. The knock came again, and then a wave splashed over him, washing away his slumber and making him gape anew. While hearing a knock wasn't particularly unusual in and of itself, the thing that bothered him was the fact that, while the door itself was fine, he was currently floating on it in the middle of the Pacific ocean, surrounded by the wreckage of his ship.

"Who's there?" He rasped, taking a great, wheezing breath and choking on the salt air.

“Tis your loyal boatswain, Douglas Mackenzie,” A deep, gurgling voice rose up from below, “Open the door and let me up, for I've been holding my breath a good long while.”

The captain was taken aback. The man must've been underwater for hours, as it had been morning when the ship first started taking on water, and now, the sun was nearing the horizon. Under his orders, Mackenzie went below to check on the severity of the leak; Almost as soon as the Scotsman disappeared below deck, the ship lurched to the side, and Karnatian was barely able to escape with his life.

“No man can hold his breath for that long, my friend,” He replied, “You're drowned, and you don't even know it.”

“Drowned, perhaps, but I still live. The ship's hold crumbled as it hit the sea floor, and I was able to slip through the hole. Your cabin boy is still trapped in the rigging; Won't you swim down and help me free him?”

For a moment, Captain Karnatian considered this. He was always fond of the boy, whose quick wit and wry sense of humor reminded him of his own son. But the reality of the situation prevailed once again, and he replied, “He's as drowned as you are, Mackenzie. Take your seat with Davy Jones, and leave the living to their struggles.”

Struggle he did, as the door floated upon the open ocean. There was no food and no water; His clothes turned to rags beneath the sun, whose light bleached his hair and forced him to squint on the rare occasions he bothered opening his salt-caked eyes. There was nothing to see save for the endless expanse of open water, which seemed to have no horizon at all but to slope up into the blue ocean of the heavens. At night, cold wind blew down from the spaces between the stars. Hunger and thirst wracked his body, and he soon grew weak and lethargic, almost to the brink of death.

On the fifth day, a seagull circled and landed upon the edge of the door. Karnatian stared at it, and it stared back with those little black eyes. It must've been tired from flying, because Karnatian's reflexes were weak from lack of food and water, and yet he managed to throttle the bird. He couldn't light a fire, but to one as starved as he, the raw meat and blood tasted better than a feast at the table of the governor of Port Royale.

“A scrap of flesh for my hunger?” Came the gurgling voice of the drowned man, “A few drops of blood to quench my thirst? The ocean's salt has baked by throat dry, and the fish have nibbled the flesh from my belly.”

Karnatian kept on chewing, then took a long slurp of blood from the bird's throat. “Never. You're a drowned corpse, Mackenzie, and you have no need of such things. Drink the salt water and crunch the fish between your scurvy-riddled gums. While I still live, I must sustain myself.”

“You live, aye, but I am not dead. My hair is full of seaweed, and the little fish have nibbled my legs down to the bone. My belly is a gaping hole; It shan't take much to fill me up.”

But the captain still refused, and ignored the boatswain's continued entreaties as he consumed the rest of the bird. Soon, all that was left were a few bones, whose marrow he spent the next two days sucking, until he finally got hungry enough to eat the bones themselves. His gums bled for a while, then stopped, and his fingers started turning white, then black. He saw another bird, but it only flew a few circles before disappearing, and he wasn't sure whether or not it was real anyway. For two days after, he lived without food or water, without moving or speaking or even opening his eyes. It was only when Douglas Mackenzie knocked on the door that his bleary, salt-caked eyes opened a crack, and he responded to his companion.

“Ho, boatswain,” The captain's voice was a harsh whisper, “What news from down below?”

“Fifteen days since Montego Bay, captain. We're flush with supplies and the rum is storing nicely.” The hand which rose from the water was black from decay, and held in its fingers a tin cup full of sloshing amber liquid. The spicy scent of Caribbean rum filled Karnatian with energy, and he reached out to grab it, but the hand moved away, holding the rum just out of reach.

“In god's name, man, let me have a drink!” He wheezed, and lunged for the glass. This movement was enough to upset the door, and Captain Karnatian tumbled into the water, leaving behind nothing but a swiftly fading ripple on the surface. Without the captain weighing it down, the next wave caused the door to flip over, and the waterlogged corpse of the boatswain floated to the surface.

[ruinousrealms]

Big thanks to Stories After Midnight for narrating my story Black Valley.

[ruinousrealms]

Black Valley

Nobody came through Black Valley anymore, not since the creek dried up and the railroad passed it by. The last settlers left years ago, leaving behind nothing but a few dilapidated shacks clustered around a shallow trench where water once ran down from the Sierra Nevadas, the blue-green peaks looming over the western horizon.

It was a ghost town in every sense of the word, and that was why Elmar Rudry liked it so much. The high desert was warm and peaceful, with little more than a stiff breeze to disturb the stillness of the afternoon, or the howling of distant coyotes at night. Nothing ever moved, nothing ever changed, and that was just the way he liked it.

The old man struck a singularly pathetic figure, dressed in rags that had once been a flannel shirt and gray pants, leaning on a stick as he hobbled between the crooked, half-collapsed buildings in what had been, once upon a time, the center of the town's commercial district. His hair was bleached white from age and the hot desert sun, falling across his shoulders and mingling with an equally long beard, which blew stiffly as the breeze passed by.

His hat was ragged, his boots so full of holes that it was a wonder the old leather soles clung together at all. It was a wonder he still bothered wearing them at all, with his hardened feet used to walking long distances across the hot earth, grinding his soles like fine-grain sandpaper. Some affectations died hard, he supposed – Like his ragged outfit, a holdover from the days when men still lived in this town, when cool, clear water flowed down from the mountains like the very blood of God-

He shook his head, catching himself. He couldn't afford to get nostalgic now – He'd long ago made his choice to stay, and there was no point dwelling in the distant past. How long had it been since the last time he saw a human face? A smooth one, a fresh one, free of the cracks and scars and strange, writhing, dripping things that flowed from the mouth and nostrils of a fresh corpse? Ten years, more?

He shrugged, and a wave of sand rolled down his shoulders like a caustic avalanche, clinging to the reddish, irritated flesh on his back. Too many years of sun had first turned his skin the color and consistency of rough Apache leather, then irritated it, wrinkles cracking and splitting apart, catching sand and sending thin streams of pus down his back.

It used to bother him. Not anymore. Nothing bothered him anymore, not the sun, not the sand, not the emptiness of his stomach nor the infernal dryness of his throat. He looked up, and realizing he was in the saloon, made his way over to the counter, where an empty whiskey bottle sat alongside a row of shot glasses, cracks running across the glass like spiderwebs. He remembered whiskey, the burn as it slid down the throat, the courage, the wild, carefree abandon it inspired after a long day's march...

It was gone. He brushed the skeleton of a scorpion off the bar and watched it shatter across the floor, then made his way up the creaking flight of stairs to the rooms of the upper floor. Each step creaked ominously beneath his feet, the nails rusty, the wood cracked and warped from years of varying temperatures.

Four of the five doors were shut, and the old man paid them no attention as he made his way to the far room, whose door he could just barely remember removing from the hinges in some long-distant vista of memory.

The object of his quest lay on the bed, two hundred and six bones, thirty-two teeth – He'd counted them meticulously, during the long days in which there was nothing left to do. They were all intact, pristine and bleached the same white as his beard, thanks to the sun and ants. He was just lucky he'd found it before the scavengers got to it – As it was, all that was missing were a few pieces of skull, which he'd been unable to find no matter where he looked. Possibly, whoever made the hole had taken them with him – Why, he couldn't say, but any man who would leave such a fine corpse laying in the desert was sure to have some strange ways.

Next to the body lay a moldy old belt and a chunk of rusted-together metal that may have once been a revolver, though the make was impossible to tell. The old man picked it up, resting his bony finger on the rusted trigger, and made a motion with his thumb as if cocking the missing hammer. He held it out, fixing the shattered forehead of the skull between rust-clogged sights, then set it down again.

He opened his mouth, a single, blackened incisor hanging from frayed tendons. His first attempt at speaking sent him into a fit of coughing, as countless weeks of accumulated dust flowed between his thin lips. When the dust settled and his throat was reasonably empty, he shook his head, and began a long-practiced speech.

“I'a Cthulhu fhtagn,” He rasped, his dry, cracked tongue straining to shape the unusual syllables, “Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu-”

“Yakut shabbur Yog-Sothoth,” The corpse responded in a tone as hollow as the space within the ribcage, “Heigin tadnor Ug-Krunog.”

“I never heard of such a thing,” The old man sputtered, “The things what live beneath Snake-Hill, they'd have told me-"

“Your death approaches, Elmar,” The corpse's tone was almost apologetic, “You know they would never tell you. You might panic and flee, and then they'd have to venture out in the daytime and fight with the other scavengers to claim what belongs to them.”

“I don't, I tell you! Elmar Rudry belongs to Elmar Rudry, no matter what the buggies say.”

“You sold yourself cheap, you know. Your Christian god may not exist, but there are certain places what are warmer than others – And a damn sight colder than this desert, where even the children of Yig dare not dwell.”

“Them snakes ain't worth the lead it takes t' put 'em down,” The old man's voice grew steadier as he got used to speaking, “I always wanted t' burn their hives, or at least drop some dynamite down their holes an' seal the entrances. Keep em from gobblin' down any unwary travelers-”

“And hitch a ride out of here,” The corpse finished for him.

“It's been too long. Longer than the bargain.”

A rattling sound emerged from between the jaws of the skull, something akin to laughter.

“Bastard. I should'a left you where I found you.”

“You don't bargain with Hol-Krava, nor the Black Goat with a Thousand Young.”

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” The old man intoned, and with a sound like rustling paper, the skeleton fell silent once more.

-=-

The year was 1862, and Private Rudry was riding hard through the desert, kicking up a plume of dust that rose like smoke from one of the big factories back in St. Louis. His once-gray uniform was coated in red dust, same with his hat and the scruffy three-day beard clinging to his narrow chin. He held the reigns in his teeth as he struggled to load his revolver, but the constant rocking of the saddle made it nearly impossible to pour the powder into each of the cylinders in the revolver – And he knew he'd need them all.

The western campaign was over. New Mexico was firmly in Union hands. Sibley and Thom Green were retreating, along with two thousand of Texas' best men, four hundred of whom now lay dead in western dust. Back home to Arizona, and from there to Texas, and then what? All the way back to Virginia, to hold off the Yankee savages by digging trenches in farmyards and town squares from Richmond to Atlanta?

Rudry couldn't read, but it didn't take some northern intellectual to understand the signs – It was doomed, the whole damned war, and he wasn't going to die in some Godforsaken foxhole or catch the flu and meet the Creator without ever meeting the enemy. No, he was headed west – West, beyond the Sierra Nevada, where the sun rose above an ocean as expansive as the desert which now surrounded him in all directions.

In the chaos of the retreat, who would've noticed a soldier slipping away, stealing a horse and riding off into the night? Somebody, apparently, or they wouldn't have sent these men after him. There were four, but he shot one on the second night, when he made the mistake of making camp in the open, and the other disappeared soon after. Maybe he was snakebit and died raving and alone as his comrades pressed on – It pained him to think of any man dying in such ignominy, let alone a fellow southerner, but it couldn't be helped. He was with the Lord now, and surely reaping his just reward for loyal service to the cause.

As for himself, he knew his soul was well beyond saving. His sin was worse than murder, worse than sodomy – If he thought service to the southern cause could save his soul, he was sorely mistaken, as loneliness and isolation only drove him onward, into the depths of depravity which even the wicked men of Nineveh would find abhorrent. Even the yankee foe, for all his cruelty, would have given him a quick death just to rid the world of his sin all the more quickly.

Sodom and Gomorrah, on the plain south of what men call the River Jordan – Albuquerque and Santa Fe, south of Rio Puerco. Truly, the Lord hath granted him a taste of the fires to come, in which his deviant soul would become another morsel on the devil's own barbacoa. He was a good little sinner, though, and he wouldn't be content with simply laying down and accepting the fires willingly.

The war lay behind him, but it was catching up fast. He could hear the hoofbeats of his pursuers just meters behind him, unable to shoot or even see in the cloud of dust from his horse's hooves. It was about all the old mare was good for, after a full week of running drove the energy from the poor beast. God really did abandon this land – It was like a blank spot upon the face of Creation, an unfinished corner bereft of life save for rattlesnakes and cacti, whose moist flesh was the only reason he hadn't died four nights ago when his last canteen ran out.

The Colt's Dragoon he carried was a gift from a Union lieutenant, back at Glorieta Pass. The boy's soul had been commended to the Lord, where he only hoped the boy received mercy for his sin of fighting against the glorious Confederacy. The bayonet of his rifle still dripped with the boy's blood when he pulled the pistol from his limp fingers and delivered a coup de grace – A kindness, better than bleeding to death or dying of infection in some butcher's field hospital.

It was a powerful little beauty, but Lord, the trigger pull was a long one and the kick worse than a mule. If you weren't careful firing, you could snap your wrist clean down the middle, and if you didn't load it correctly – Too much powder, or too little, the thing could just as easily blow up in your hand and do the enemy's job for him.

“Jesus, Mary, and all the saints,” He muttered, rotating the cylinder and clicking the lock into place, “Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”

Glancing over his shoulder, he could see the silhouettes of the riders shifting as they fanned out, one on each side and riding hard to escape the smokescreen. The one on the left came out first, his gray uniform hidden beneath a brown longcoat, and a revolver-rifle in his hands. It was a powerful weapon in the right hands, a step between a musket and one of Henry's new repeaters, but there was enough room in the breach that dirt could easily get in – Which is why, when the gunman raised the rifle and took aim, Rudry didn't bother to duck.

There was a click, and another, and then an explosion and the sensation of air whipping past his face – He turned just in time to see the other rider coming up behind him, his unbuttoned coat flapping behind him like a cape. The weapon in his hands was a Henry, and Rudry cursed to high heaven as another bullet tore past him, barely scraping the back of his collar.

Another shot cracked out by the time Rudry got his bearings, this one grazing the horse's haunch and causing the poor beast to cry out, stumbling slightly as blood trickled down its leg. It was barely a scratch, and Rudry spared the beast no mercy, jamming his spurs into the horse's bloody thighs. He could see the rider coming alongside him, rifle at the ready for a single clear shot.

The fully-loaded Dragoon felt heavy in his hand, too heavy for a man to hold – It wasn't designed to kill men, really, but Nephilim and Indians, which Rudry quietly suspected were the same thing, having never met any of either party. He didn't bother looking, he just pulled the trigger. The bark of the gun was nothing compared to the screaming of the horse as the bullet tore through its thick hide, lodging itself deep in its chest. Its legs buckled, and now it was the rider's turn to scream as he was thrown from the saddle, landing head-first with an awful crunch.

One threat down, he turned to the second gunman, but as he turned around, all he could see was empty desert, red sand and wind-blown rocks in every direction. In one direction, however, a pair of buttes stuck out against the noonday sky, and between them, a faint cloud of dust receded into the distance. The coward bolted.

Rudry chuckled, and the fallen rider groaned, southern blood trickling from a gash in his scalp and spilling across the damned Yankee sand. Hopping down from his saddle, Rudry pulled a Bowie knife from the sheath on his belt, and put an end to the poor wretch. The horse's legs were twitching, but the bullet had clearly hit something vital. He hefted his revolver and considered putting a round into it, but his bullet pouch was dreadfully light.

The Henry, on the other hand, was caught beneath the beast's belly, with only part of the now-bent barrel sticking out. It didn't take a gunsmith to know it'd be useless, even if he could shove the thousand or so pounds of dead weight off of it.

With only slight regret, he climbed back on his horse, turned, and made to follow his other pursuer.

-=-

The hunter was now the hunted. Revolver in hand, Rudry crept through the ruined stockade and into the ghost town. Black Valley was the name, according to a bullet-scarred sign hanging from the sheriff's office – He guessed it was the sheriff's office, on account of the rusty iron cage sitting in the center of the otherwise empty building. It must've been a fine town in it's day, though how long ago that was, he dared not venture a guess. It could've been built any time between last week and Coronado's first visit to the region more than two centuries prior.

Maybe the local gold or silver mine ran dry, or maybe there never was one to begin with – Some Yankee shyster selling stakes in a phony mine, stealing people's life savings while they slowly died out in some godforsaken wilderness. It wouldn't be the first time, and with the defeat of the Glorious Cause all but inevitable, it sure as shootin' wouldn't be the last.

There were a good dozen structures still standing, mostly one- or two-room shacks, along with the aforementioned sheriff's office, a small church, a saloon – The only two-story building in town, if you didn't count the upper level of the church, which Rudry didn't, as the roof had mostly caved in on top of it. In the dying light, and in light of his sin, he passed it by, scarcely turning to glance inside.

He was glad he did, however, as a shift in the darkness caught his attention – Movement. He dropped to his knees just in time for a bullet to rip past him, ricocheting off a rock just behind him. He raised the revolver and let off a round of his own, the flash illuminating the entryway to the church, and for just a moment, he could make out the silhouette of a man behind a pew, his face pale behind the sights of his rifle.

He ducked, giving Rudry time to move for cover behind the empty doorway. A volley rang out, one, two, three shots, the first two hitting the ground, and the last one slamming into the doorframe and sending out a flurry of splinters. Four shots fired in total, two left – While he still had five heavy .44 bullets loaded in his Dragoon.

“Don't come any closer!” The man in the church shouted, “Damn you! Damn you!”

He was moving around, fumbling in the dark. Rudry could hear the pews screeching as he shoved them out of his way.

“Damn yourself!” He responded, “Put it down, and we'll get our backsides outta this here firehole!”

“You killed Jim!”

“He was shootin' at me. Whaddya expect me t' do, shake his hand?”

“Damn you!”

“You said that already, kid.”

The gunman responded with another shot, but this one didn't hit near the door – There was a loud splashing sound, like a rock thrown in water, followed by a strange, half-strangled yell from the gunman.

“What in the blazes..?” Rudry muttered, peeking around the door, but he could see nothing past the small entryway, the rest of the interior cloaked in shadow. Something was definitely moving in there, but whether it was the gunman, or something else entirely, he couldn't say. There shuffling sounds, as if something very large were moving across the floor toward the back of the church.

Turning the corner, Rudry fired a shot, and the flash brightened the entire church, right to the back. In that split second, he got a good look at the interior – A few rows of wooden pews leading to a pulpit, behind which sat the remains of a large cross, the horizontal beam having fallen off, and was now leaning against the vertical one.

Between them, though – Rudry blinked, and everything was dark once more. For just a second, he fancied that he saw something faint, indistinct, standing between the pulpit and the cross, a kind of splotch of shadow – In the darkened church, nothing unusual, save that it seemed to be relegated to a single spot in midair. He didn't spare a second to think about it. More importantly, the gunman was nowhere to be seen, probably hiding behind a pew – And Rudry had just exposed himself.

Rudry leapt back behind the doorway, waiting for the kid to make his move – But nothing came, and after a few long seconds, he ventured to shout, “Hello?”

After a few seconds with no response, he grasped his pistol tightly, and slowly peeked around the corner. When no shots came, he stepped into the open and stood for a second, then took a couple steps into the church, where the light from the setting sun gave way to near pitch-darkness. As he stood there in the still silence, he noticed a faint sound coming from behind one of the pews, barely audible above the faint ringing in his ears from his previous shot.

Behind the bench lay the gunman, as white as Georgia cotton and twisted into an expression that sent a shiver down the hardened soldier's spine. The man's body was twitching, his hands and feet shaking as if in the throes of an epileptic seizure, but that wasn't it. It was as if he was struggling against something, or at least, that was the impression Rudry got from the way he thrust his hands forward, only to slam back down as if being shoved by powerful hands.

“Damn you – D-damn you!” He muttered incessantly, his tongue straining to give shape to the words as blood trickled from cracks in his parched lips. His entire lower face was covered in the stuff, like a sanguine beard. The blood was so thick he could smell it.

A quick visual inspection showed no obvious signs of injury, no entry wounds where Rudry's shot might've ricocheted and hit him. The poor fool's brain was scrambled, probably half-baked from too many long hours under the unforgiving New Mexico sun. Rudry had seen it all before, men dropping mid-march and dying on the burning sand, having never met the enemy. They were useless – Orders were to leave them where they fell, as dragging them along would only slow the column down.

It was the same for him, now. What could he do for the madman? He could splint a broken bone or stitch shut a gaping wound, that was it. Should he tie him down to keep him from gouging his own eyes out, sharing his water with him even though he was bound to die anyway? Grunting, he pulled out his knife and dug it deep in the man's throat. He hardly responded to the cut – Barely bled, in fact, for which Rudry was eminently grateful.

He didn't even gurgle as he died. Rudry felt his way through the church, stepping carefully to avoid tripping on a loose board. The moon rose quickly, filling the room with a pale light that cast queer shadows over everything. Rudry stopped and glanced around, blinking in surprise – Had he lost track of time? He'd taken a pocket watch from the man whose horse he'd shot, but he didn't have a clue how to read it.

Something moved in the corner of his eye, near the pulpit. He spun around, gun at the ready, but nothing was there. “Bats,” He muttered, and slipped his gun back into the holster.

To his surprise, there was a book on the pulpit, but it wasn't a Christian bible – Instead of a cross, the cover bore the image of a stick with five branches, three on one side, two on the other. It was cast from silver, shimmering faintly in the moonlight. Maybe that was the movement. He let out a chuckle, then stopped, as the sound seemed to profane the silence which had settled around him.

The book was strange, no doubt about it. Elmar Rudry could read no better than he could speak Dutch, and the language of the book was definitely not Dutch. They weren't letters like any he'd ever seen before, a lot of squiggly shapes with hooks, curves, and little dots sprinkled here and there like drops from a leaking pen. Every few pages was an illustration, portraying monsters of all shapes and sizes, none of which looked even slightly familiar to him.

There were things without heads, with squiggly lines spewing from their mouths – How a headless creature could have a mouth was beyond him, but that was what was portrayed. One image, to which he felt particularly drawn, appeared to be a normal human man, hands and feet outstretched to show off his body. If he were a scholarly type, he'd have recognized the outline of Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.

The outline was where the similarities ended, however, as closer inspection revealed certain anatomical irregularities, particularly centered around the subject's groin. Retching slightly in his mouth, Rudry flipped the page, not caring if he ripped the fragile vellum.

He found himself drawn to the strange scribbles. His eyes glazed over the longer he stared at them, the funny little hooks and curves writhing across the page like so many little ringworms in the skin of a dying sow. They were beautiful, in their own unusual way, and before he could tear himself away, he'd read the spread pages five times over.

“This ain't Christian,” He muttered to himself. But then, he was hardly a Christian anymore, and so he turned the page, the ancient vellum crinkling beneath his callused fingertips.

-=-

“Ia Cthulhu,” The old man repeated, staring down at the corpse on the bed, “Ia Cthulhu, there ain't no end for me, not on this mortal Earth.”

He repeated that same phrase as he hobbled out of the saloon, adjusting his hat to keep the sun out of his sensitive eyes. Too many years of reading alone in the dark had turned them milky and dim, even though they weren't really useful with the kinds of books he read. He could feel it in his forehead, pulsing, the little cone-shaped gland that Dee so loved to expound upon, and Alhazred harbored such a desire to caress that, in a fit of mad lust, the prophet cracked his own skull with a rock and dug through useless tissue to find the thing.

Rudry had never gone quite that far, though the dark, lonely nights did sometimes drive him to strange extremes regardless. He could taste colors now, and hear smells – The sunlight was too loud these days, pounding in his ancient ears even louder than his own heartbeat, which had recently taking up the tune of an old marching song from-

“Ia Cthulhu,” He banished the thought with another repetition of his mantra, the one he'd repeated so many times over the decades, “Death o' the firstborn, an' welcome th' rain o' frogs. Teacheth mine hands not for war, o Great Ones, but to sin and make merry until the Coming.”

He learned it from his book – The terrible book, the wonderful book, whose presence on the church pulpit was at once inexplicable and miraculous. It was as if God himself led him to it, though he knew instinctively that the mere existence of such a tome was absolute evidence against His existence. No good, orderly world could ever suffer the knowledge contained within that accursed thing.

The words never did make sense to him, but every time he looked, he felt like he was learning. New knowledge simply popped up in the back of his brain as if he knew it all along. Indeed, the only unease he felt anymore was the idea that, in some vague, ill-defined time, he [i]hadn't[/i] known these things. Shoggoth kulai, creatures of the blackest text – They lived, the words, letters, and language, they had lived and they forever would, ensnaring his soul in their web of horror and beauty from the day he first gazed upon the thing.

His body waned as his mind waxed strong, muscle fading, feebleness setting in, but it was a small price to pay for the things he learned. He learned of spheres beside our own, beings from beyond the realm of human understanding. He saw cities wreathed in flame, trains that flew through the air like great serpents – Or was it serpents like giant trains? He couldn't remember. It had been years since he'd seen that particular page. He could try and look it up again, but the pages had a tendency to change whenever he wasn't looking at them.

The vast octopoid things would rise from the deep and reclaim their land. Perhaps it had already happened – The scale of time in the book was rather strange, as was his own perception of it, born of countless decades of isolation. It could've been eons – For all he knew, men were gone and the world was ruled by rabbits who remembered the former dominant species only as a predatory bogeyman who came for disobedient little kits in the dead of night.

Well, those were all after his time. His life, unnaturally elongated though it was, was finally nearing an end. Or was it a beginning? For a man such as he, death was but a door, time but a window, and with his knowledge, there were certain ways of cheating it. Snake-Hill, for example, and them what lived beneath – His close friends and allies through all these long years, would surely be able to help, or at least give him an alternative to whatever foul oblivion into which his consciousness might be thrown upon the cessation of his heartbeat.

Snake-Hill lay just to the east of town, no more than an hour's walk, but by the time the old man arrived at the base of the low rise of earth, it was nearing nightfall. He didn't own a lantern, nor did he see fit to bring so much as a flintstone and a piece of steel; In the dark, his bleary eyes were even less useful than usual, but he knew the way to the entrance by heart, having made the trip almost weekly for countless years.

It didn't take a lot of poking around for him to find the hole, small enough to be mistaken for a rabbit's warren, and poking a toe inside, he jostled it a bit, trying to disturb the inhabitant enough to come out.

“C'mon, feller,” He rasped, “We got business, you an' I.”

Something warm and wet pressed against his toe, and he pulled it back just as a green, polypus thing oozed out. It shifted and swelled before him, swallowing up dirt and sandmites and scorpions, whatever didn't get out of the way in time. Rudry practically leapt back, landing hard on his ankle, but it didn't break, despite the cracking sound and the burst of pain. If his suspicions were correct, it didn't matter anyway. He wasn't going to be walking anywhere anytime soon.

It was as big as a fair-sized horse, covered in a kind of gelatinous outer layer thick enough to conceal whatever lay beneath. The surface was dotted with orifices with thick, almost human-like lips constantly opening and closing, gasping in air and exhaling puffs of blue smoke, whose smell wrinkled the old man's nose and stung his eyes.

The creature had no real limbs, but every once in a while, one of the orifices would open up, and a long, slender tendril would emerge to swat a fly, or capture it and drag it inside the thing's maw. It wasn't eating, of course, any fool could tell that such a beast took no sustenance upon this mortal plane.

As he stared at it, he noticed that the thing appeared to be seething, the surface rippling like an ocean in a storm, full of little air bubbles that burst as they rose to the top of the gelatinous layer. It was about as clear as mud, and the sun didn't shine on it so much as through it, getting lost somewhere in the depths of the semiliquid surface. It almost seemed to swallow the light, or perhaps, to radiate darkness; Either way, it stuck out like a sore tooth amid the ruined town.

A pair of tendrils emerged from the creature's belly, covered in thick, oily pus that hissed it dripped on the ground. They twisted into a shape like a sailor's knot, and Elmar repeated the motion, doing his best approximation with his hands. A low gurgle rose from one of the orifices in the creature's side, and a foul, greenish mist began to pump out.

The smell was acrid, even by Elmar's standards, a mixture of burnt cordite and the gas which builts up inside a corpse, only to rupture and spread its putrescence through the hot, dry desert air. Opening his arms and closing his eyes, he inhaled the foul stench and savored it like a sommelier nosing a fine wine.

“Ia Cthulhu,” He muttered to nobody in particular – Certainly not the beast, whose sensory organs couldn't possibly perceive such a mundane form of communication as speech. There was a strange sensation in his loins, and he looked down to see an erection, something he hadn't experienced in more decades than he cared to count. He smirked at the sight – Human procreation was so delicate, so fragile, so utterly limited that it was hard to describe it as procreation at all, more like cloning, or spreading the seed of some wild desert flower. Only fools cared for such things, fools and creatures so low in evolution that they were like comparing men with ants... Or perhaps, comparing an ant with the bacteria clinging to the dung it feasted on.

He was beginning to understand now what the skeleton had meant. Death – O Death, in this way, wasn't a death at all, but a transition, a Becoming. For in the arms of the Worm, ensconced within the cool, damp caverns underneath Snake-Hill, he would achieve something, attain something, and in doing so, pass beyond what fools called existence, and clung to so dearly, as if a single breath of waking life were worth the strain it put on the soul.

“Shub-Niggurath an' the Conqueror Worm,” He closed his eyes, spreading out his arms to accept his fate, “I'm home.”

Two tendrils lashed out of the thing, accompanied by a burst of gas from one of the jiggling mouths. They touched his arms, suction-feelers sinking into his skin, and he hissed as pain coursed through his arteries – The creature tasted his insides, and the tendrils retreated, leaving the ragged ends of arteries to spurt blood.

Whether the creature liked it, he couldn't say, but when Elmar Rudry felt the ends of the tendrils pressing against his closed eyelids, he understood. His eyeballs popped like ripe cherries, and the scream he let out could've woken the dead. Upstairs in the saloon, there was a rattle of bones, but that stopped along with the scream as the creature's slimy appendages dug into the old man's brain, and, finding nothing of any particular interest, withdrew its tentacles.

The old man's body collapsed, limp and lifeless, and the creature returned from whence it came. A few hours later, a coyote, flea-bitten and half-starved, came upon the corpse, but the meat was far from fresh, and the smell clinging to it stung the canine's nostrils. He took a cursory sniff and turned away in search of something more palatable.

[ruinousrealms]

Skin Dredges thrive in dark spaces. Due to their small size and speed, they can easily hide in cracks when the light is turned on. Never enter a dark area with exposed skin. It only takes two seconds for a single Skin Dredge to remove one square centimeter of flesh. Skin Dredge wounds should be dabbed with a Class B Solvent to prevent infection. Skin Dredge infection is always fatal and may result in Post-Mortem Autocannibalism Syndrome.

REPORT ALL INCIDENTS

US DEP'T OF THE ARMY

[ruinousrealms]

They’re coming

[ruinousrealms]

The Very Strange Horse

Whiskey Buck stood alone in the darkened barn, sniffing the lock on his pen. It had been almost a week since the owners of the ranch took the rest of the horses, loaded them up with tack and saddle and led them away; They didn't even spare the chestnut stallion a final glance as they swung the barn doors shut, the heavy latch slamming down outside. Usually, that was meant to keep the doors from swinging open in a windstorm, and there had been similar noises - A roar on the first day, and the ground shook; The second, a distant crashing like the thunder of hooves on hard-packed soil. Engines were a common sound, but since the barn was the furthest building from the road, he couldn't tell if they were coming or going.

Since then, the only sounds were the chirping birds, and the usual creaking of the ancient timbers of the barn, which had been built in the days of his grandsire, a great showhorse named Big Zadok, tales of whom were still told around the salt lick by young colts.

Lately, there had been new tales circulating around the barn, rumors of war, whispered tales of marching armies and distant apocalypse. Nobody knew what to make of them, not even Whiskey, who was one of the older horses at the ranch, being almost twenty-five in human years. Though his knees creaked and his back ached from long years under the saddle, the stallion wasn't yet ready to go Behind The Shed, where his sire and dam had gone many years previous, to join the Great Rodeo. He was content to stand in his pen, munching on oats and enjoying the breeze whenever the horses were let out to the pasture.

Food had been growing scarcer lately, even before the humans and the others disappeared; The hay bales grew smaller and smaller, the feedbags fewer and farther between, until everybody in the barn had given up complaining, simply sitting and listening to their grumbling stomachs. Sometimes, a horse was taken away and never seen again. Now they were all gone, and he was still there. It was a mystery that was destined to remain as one.

Whiskey Buck hadn't seen them in five days, and hadn't eaten in two, since he gnawed the last of the rotting hay from the floor of his pen. His stomach had long since stopped twisting and turning from hunger, and he'd given up on the chance of escape - He was too old to jump it, and the stall too well-built for him to break through. Even if he could get past the padlocked gate, there was no way he'd be able to push through the barn door, not with that heavy beam holding it shut from the outside. So it was that Whiskey Buck, a fine old riding horse, sat alone in the dark and starved.

It was in the midst of a dark afternoon that the doors opened. Whiskey Buck instinctively shut his eyes against the sudden flood of blazing sunlight; For the past days, his only source of light had been a single skylight in the hay loft, filling the barn with a faint luminescence. Now, squinting, he could just barely make out the forms of three humans - Had the ranchers returned? If so, where were the rest of the horses? He didn't care, he was just eager to see something, anything, his stomach twisting at the prospect of food. They carried big sacks over their shoulders - Oats, perhaps, or barley? He was particularly a fan of barley, the way the little kernels popped between his teeth... Though that this point, he'd take anything that was presented to him.

These weren't normal humans, at least, not like any of the humans he'd ever known - The ranch was run by a staff of muscular, hardy men and women, with firm bodies and broad shoulders, people whose every step commanded respect. The tourists, conversely, were almost entirely overweight, waddling around with smug self-assurance, and eyeing the horses with a mixture of fright and fascination. Once on your back, one of the riders would lead the horse around, doing the same few basic tricks, walking, staying, turning around, and jumping over little obstacles...

The memories of warm summer days spent riding little circles around the ring were truly sweet ones, but it had been a long time since the summertime, and normally, the riders would've started training the horses again in preparation for tourist season, which couldn't have been more than a few weeks away. Instead, they'd all grown worried and snappy, arguing with one another nonstop for days prior to their ultimate leaving. Those memories weren't so sweet, however, so he turned back to the humans.

These humans were neither riders nor tourists. They had the same general shape, four limbs, a long, upright torso, a little oval-shaped head, but that was where the similarities ended. Instead of the upright, confident pose he was used to, these people walked slowly and carefully, holding long sticks in their hands and shining little torches across the barn, as if hunting for a lost calf. The bags on their backs weren't feedsacks, but big green backpacks, and as his eyes adjusted to the new light, he saw that instead of the customary plaid shirt and jeans, these humans wore mottled green outfits, with head-hugging hats with no brim.

One of them, a man, judging by the shape of his body, happened to glance into the corner stall where Whiskey Buck stood, shining his light directly into the horse's eyes. Buck let out a whinny and shut his eyes, too weak to properly protest, or even turn away from the blinding light.

"Holy shit!" He shouted, rushing over to the stallion with the same eager giddiness as some of the younger tourists. All trace of exhaustion disappeared from his face as he tugged on the gate, and finding it locked, snipped through the padlock with a pair of wirecutters. The door swung open, and the stallion stood there, shaking his head, before taking his first step outside of the stall in days.

"You want to ride the horsey?" Another one, a woman, didn't even turn around, shining her flashlight into the tool and tack boxes stacked against the far wall, "And how are you going to keep it fed, huh? And watered?" Her voice was hard and cynical, and though Whiskey couldn't understand the words, something about her tone put him on edge, "The second somebody sees you on that thing, they'll shoot it and eat it. Better we do that ourselves."

The man's expression fell, but he offered no protest.

"Sorry, boy," He whispered, running a gloved hand along the stallion's cheek, "But we need to eat. At least you won't need to suffer anymore."

His tone was gentle and kind, like that of a child, in awe at seeing such a majestic beast for the first time, or the vet whenever a mare was giving birth. There was something else about it, something in his eyes that unnerved him just as much as the woman's tone. It sounded a bit like the rancher when it came time to lead someone to Behind The Shed. He was old, but even now, hungry and miserable, he wasn't yet ready to meet Big Zadok and his foresires. No, there was still a hint of strength hidden away in the old horse, somewhere deep down, like a lantern that still flickers after most of the oil has run out. He was running on fumes, but even that was better than simply keeling over and submitting to whatever fate these new humans might wish upon him.

A strange urge came over the stallion as he stared at the human, their eyes meeting in the darkness. Something unknown instinct, utterly alien to the herbivore, seemed to awaken from unfathomable depths in his mind. Humans gave horses food - This was a simple fact of life. Where did food come from? He couldn't say, he'd never known life outside of the Sesqua Valley Dude Ranch. This human was big and juicy, shaped a little bit like an overripe apple, his favorite snack. It took only the slightest leap in logic for him to conclude, in his half-starved delirium, that humans were food - And the rest came naturally.

Lowering his head and nickering, the stallion made as if he were asking for a pet, and the human obliged, raising a hand... And Whiskey opened his mouth and clamped his teeth around the man's wrist. The howl he let out alerted the others, and he struggled to pull free, bashing against the horse's head with his flashlight. The stallion was used to the agony of hunger, however, and such physical blows did nothing to loosen his grip.

The man's writhing fingers brushed against his tongue, and he found himself enjoying the taste of blood seeping from where his flat-topped teeth had broken through the skin. One of the humans, another male, rushed over and began hammering on the horse's nose as well. There was a crunch as his grip grew tighter, and then, suddenly, the man fell away, reeling on the floor and shrieking as he clutched the bloody stump of his wrist. For a moment, the others seemed too shocked to move, and Whiskey Buck just stood there, placidly chewing his prize. The bones were hard to crunch through, but he managed to grind them into a fine, marrowy paste, which he swallowed with the same gusto as if it were a handful of oats.

The man's hand tasted good, leaving a pleasant taste in his mouth, but his stomach was still grumbling from all the days he'd spent without food. He needed more. The wounded man writhed around, screaming coarse words in his comrade's face, who was only trying to help him up.

The man crouched down, grabbing his friend by the arm and struggling to haul him to his feet. He'd taken off his little round hat, revealing a head covered in closely-cropped hair. There were little bald spots here and there, marked with clusters of quivering reddish blisters. It wasn't as appetizing as the other guy's hand, but he was in no position to discriminate. Saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth, his eyes growing smaller and beadier, as his pupils grew to eclipse his brown retinas.

His flat herbivore teeth stretched out, growing long and jagged, with razor-sharp points that cracked through the man's skull like a knife through paper. He didn't even scream, simply letting out a half-choked sigh as his body went limp, which was just fine by Whiskey Buck. The man's skull folded before his teeth, and his body fell over his friend, pinning him to the ground. He struggled to push him off, screaming and cursing as the carnivorous stallion stepped over him to lap up the remains of the man's brain from the hay-strewn ground. his tongue grew long and pointed, covered in hairy little bristles that latched onto whatever they touched, bringing whole mouthfuls of warm gray matter.

The stallion's hooves were starting to feel funny, a bit tingly, kind of like whenever he was being reshoed. Looking down, he saw his hooves stretching out to the sides, the steel shoes creaking and groaning as the keratin they were attached to began to change. He lifted one, and watched as the nails slid out one by one, clattering to the ground next to the struggling man's head, followed by the shoe, which was deformed as if someone had tried to bend it back on itself. His hooves weren't really hooves anymore, they were more like paws, with three long black talons curling out. The man's screams were starting to fray his nerves, and slowly, deliberately, he brought his massive paw down on the man's head, muffling his shrieks as he applied more and more pressure, until-

There was a sharp crack, and something hit Whiskey Buck in the chest; Looking down, he saw nothing but a faint ripple in his flesh, which faded like that of a pebble thrown in a pond. It came from the woman's stick, he realized, a long black tube with a little box attached to it, from which another flash and explosion bellowed. The stallion didn't feel a long, though 'stallion' hardly described the beast anymore. His fur was falling off in clumps, his gaunt body expanding with thick, well-defined muscle. He was beyond the size of a mere draft horse, his lengthening legs pushing him away from the floor, closer and closer to the rafters. From his perspective, the woman looked like a child, and her gun was about as threatening as a wet mop. While the man's head popped beneath his clawed appendage, he took a step forward, causing the entire barn to rattle on its foundations.

"Fuck this!" The woman shrieked, firing uselessly at the advancing beast, "Fuck this!"

Throwing her gun down, she turned to run, but she didn't make it halfway to the door before the beast's paw swept out, bowling her off her feet. She didn't scream, which was nice, since the beast's ears were more sensitive than before, picking up every little sound, the creaking of the barn timbers, the soft scuffing of her hands against the floor as she struggled to crawl away. She dragged herself along on her elbows, her legs as stiff as boards, and there was a funny kink in the small of her back.

Lowering his head, Whiskey Buck snorted, and she paused as the hot air blew against her head. She muttered something, maybe a curse, maybe a prayer. The beast didn't really care, simply snapping her up in his jaws and swallowing the woman whole, like the morsel she was.

Stepping out into the blazing sun, the former stallion glanced around the barren farmyard, dimly noting the familiar landmarks - The ranch house, the guest cottages, the various paddocks for different events. These were his familiar haunts, but he no longer felt any particular interest in running around the competition pen, or letting children sit on his back at the hitching post. His stomach grumbled, and he sniffed the air, his nostrils wide as he gulped down the cool spring air. It didn't carry the same pleasant odor as he was used to - No, this was the sickly-sweet smell of decay, something he'd very rarely experienced, aside from that time those raccoons got stuck in the hay loft. This smell was much stronger, and he followed it around the barn and down the hill to the toolshed, the very one that legend told was the gateway to the Great Rodeo.

The area around the shed was strewn with the bodies of horses in a state of advanced decomposition. Some were bloated with gas, while others had already burst, exposing their organs to little feasting creatures. Flies swarmed so thickly that it was hard to make out the markings of any of them, rats and crows and a veritable army of tiny red ants digging into the decaying meat. Despite his hunger, Whiskey Buck left the carrion feast behind, trotting back up the hill and toward the road, whereupon horses were forbidden to tread. His gigantic paw, easily the size of a human itself, thudded heavily on the asphalt, which cracked beneath its weight. Down the road, he knew, was Town, a place full of humans and other creatures. He'd been taken there a few times as a young colt, showing off to the crowds in parades and during festivals. Now, those memories, dim as a horse's memories are, showed him an unending feast. If dragons could smile, Whiskey Buck surely would have, taking his first steps down the empty highway.

Whiskey Buck had been many things in his life. A workhorse, a showhorse, and toward the end, a saddle horse for tourists. Now, standing at the very brink of reality itself, the stallion had broken free of the entropy which had gripped the rest of the universe and become a carnivore. It's true what they say, you can't keep a good horse down.

[ruinousrealms]

Huge thanks to Madame Raven for narrating Randolph Carter and the Necrophagic Shadows of Verdun.

[ruinousrealms]

Randolph Carter and the Necrophagic Shadows of Verdun

There was another barrage that night. The Germans didn't play around when it came to artillery; The sound of cannonfire was a continuous hum, and their muzzle flashes illuminated the horizon like the glow of a distant dawn. The French responded in kind, and shells came screaming down on both sides. Soldiers huddled in their foxholes, swaddled in filthy overcoats and lice-ridden blankets, and prayed to God Almighty that whoever was hit tonight, it wouldn't be them, or anybody they knew. At least, nobody who owed them money.

Standing watch behind a wall of sandbags, Corporal Carter felt uncomfortably exposed. Every now and again, a shell would land nearby, and he'd duck down as dirt and shrapnel battered the sandbags. The 105s were less accurate than the French guns, but there was always the danger of a single stray shell landing a little too close to the target. If that happened, he was supposed to dive into the foxhole behind him. Assuming he made it that far, of course.

He couldn't even smoke. The light from a cigarette was a bullseye for the snipers dotted across no man's land. Peering into the darkness was like having a bag over your head; He may as well have been blind. He could barely even see the machine gun leaning against the barricade, the barrel poking through a firing slit no wider than his finger. It was a clunky machine, barely able to fire five rounds without jamming up. He'd have preferred a pistol, but where would a mere corporal acquire such a vaunted thing? His belt-knife would have to do. Of course, if a German patrol snuck up on him, neither a machine gun nor even the men snoring in the nearby foxholes could help him.

In the pitch blackness, it was only natural for his mind to start to wander. Vague reddish shapes drifted through the shadows, and Carter blinked hard to banish them. Strange notions bubbled up from some forgotten corner of his imagination – The stench of mud, feces, and less mentionable things grew heavy, making the air seem as thick as oil. He shook his head and peered over the parapet. The flashes on the horizon were fewer and farther between, and the dull thudding of distant guns was beginning to die down. Perhaps the barrage was over, or maybe they were just taking a break, waiting for soldiers to crawl out of their holes just to be slaughtered in the next wave of shells.

He pushed up his sleeve and checked his watch, the radium-illuminated dial showing a time just past midnight. Only a couple more hours, and he'd be relieved. If he was lucky, the rest of his watch would be uneventful. Wishful thinking, of course – Even as he thought that, he could hear the telltale whine of incoming shells. Most of them were quiet, and he could tell they weren't aiming anywhere near him.

One scream was louder than the rest, and Carter, with reflexes honed over two years in the trenches, dove for the nearest cover, a half-finished foxhole the soldiers had been using as a latrine pit. He folded his body up like an accordion as the shell burst, and clumps of dirt and sharp bits of stone pummeled his overcoat. Something hit his helmet and made his ears ring. A shard of shrapnel slammed into the dirt near his hand, and a stray rock left a gash across his cheek. Before the war, he'd have considered that a nasty cut. Now, he didn't even bother wiping away the blood.

As the echo of the explosion died away, he slowly unfurled himself and took stock of himself. All four limbs were still present. His overcoat was torn, but it was falling apart anyway. Maybe he could finally wrangle a new one from the quartermaster-sergeant. His watch was still intact, which was good, since the damned thing cost him nearly a week's wage. Just as he was about to sigh in relief, there was a faint clicking sound nearby, which his well-trained ears identified as a hobnail boot striking stone.

Sandbags were scattered all over, some burst, and he found himself crawling through that wet, mulchy filth as he fumbled around for the machine gun. He cut his hand on something sharp and cursed in French, as was his habit after so long in the Legion. It was only when he closely inspected the thing that he realized it was the twisted remnants of the machine gun, utterly destroyed by the shell's blast. For a moment, he understood just how incredibly lucky he'd been to escape with nothing but bruises – But he heard the sound again, closer now, and drew the knife from his belt. Six inches of steel stood between him and... Whatever was out there.

"Arrêt!" He hissed, "Mot de passe!"

The stench of decay filled his nostrils, a common odor in the trenches, where the dead might lay unburied for weeks before a truce could be arranged to collect them. This smell was somehow worse than that, as if an army of the deceased had climbed the hillside to assail his tiny position atop the ridge. He had to fight to keep from gagging, but the strange impression refused to leave. What manner of man or beast stood before him in the darkness? As it moved closer, it became harder to reconcile the noises and smells with that of any creature he knew. It sounded wet and sloppy as it moved across the disturbed earth, breathing raspily and pausing every now and again to sniff the air.

He could almost make out the shape as it clambered over the fallen barricade, moving slowly on all fours. It was too big to be a wolf, but too small to be a lion – Which they didn't have in France anyway, or did they? A shiver ran down Carter's spine, and he clutched the knife even tighter, his knuckles turning white. He glanced in the direction of the dugout, where his comrades lay sleeping; If he could just alert them, he might have a chance. He opened his mouth to shout, but before he could, the beast lunged him, pushing him flat on his back. His shout turned into a scream of pain and fear as claws dug into his chest, turning his uniform to rags.

His body moved on instinct alone, slashing with one hand while trying to push the thing away with the other. Blood splashed his face as he rammed the knife home again and again. The beast didn't stop clawing, didn't even grunt as he stabbed it, though every thrust opened another spout of blood. It faltered slightly with every thrust, slowing as mortal wound piled upon mortal wound; Just when Carter thought the beast was beginning to falter, something grunted behind him – Another one of the fiends? It shouted, and though he couldn't make out the words, he recognized the language as French.

There was a sudden crack, and the beast fell limply atop Carter. The legionnaire pushed it off easily – Now dead, it weighed no more than a heavy rucksack. What seemed like strength was really nothing more than animalistic ferocity. Someone grabbed him and pulled him away, dragging the wounded man into a sitting position. A light shone in his face, blinding him; Blinking hard, he recognized the face of Lieutenant Seeger, the only other American in the company.

“Are you alright, Carter? Those scratches look deep – Mitteroux, Albrecht, bring a stretcher, quickly!”

Carter tried to focus on his friend's voice, but his ears wouldn't stop ringing. He shook his head, and white-hot pain shot up from his shoulder where the thing had clawed him – He glanced down at it, but only for a second, as the sight of bone and joint-gristle was enough to make him spill his dinner down the front of his shirt. If the sight of his own mutilation was disturbing, however, what he saw laying on the ground, mere feet from where he now sat, was enough to drive any sane man mad. Luckily for Randolph Carter, no sane man would've joined the Foreign Legion to begin with.

It had been a man, once, that much was obvious. Judging by the cut of the boots, it might've been a German. Perhaps he deserted, or got lost on patrol, or simply went mad from the immeasurable strain of war. He'd been in no man's land for some time, long enough for his clothes to rot and his very skin to begin to fester. The necrophagic fiend was covered in gaping sores, wounds from bullet and bayonet alike, no doubt left by previous, less fortunate victims. His jagged fingernails were like claws – Where he had fingernails, and the flesh wasn't worn away to reveal little white stumps of bone. The face was gaunt and hairy, with a long beard and two deep-set, beady eyes that no longer showed any sign of human intelligence.

Even with these new stab wounds and a gunshot to the belly, the thing's chest still gently rose and fell. It was still breathing when Carter was loaded onto the stretcher, and only as he was being hauled off did he hear the gunshot which finally put the man – Beast – Whatever it was – To rest. The fields near Douamont were a veritable feast. A man could live out there for months, Seeger explained on the way to the aid station, assuming he wasn't a picky eater. He'd probably been watching Carter all night, and when the shell hit, assumed he was dead and closed in for an easy meal. It was a neat and tidy explanation, and it wrapped things up quite nicely. Carter appreciated that, but when he heard about poor Seeger's death in the trenches of the Somme, and the strange bite marks found on his friend's body, he couldn't help but wonder.

His butchered shoulder was enough to get him a medical discharge. Within a month, Carter was back in America, placed under the convalescent care of the fine doctors of Arkham Sanitarium. Friends came to visit – Warren, Pickman, even that reclusive Providence writer paid him a quick visit. Eventually, the doctors declared him healed and sent him on his way. Peace seemed like a dream after so long at war, and he drifted through the waking world like a ghost. It all seemed so inane, so utterly meaningless. His old habit of writing, forged during his school years and lost, like so many other things, in the trenches, came back quickly, and served as something of a refuge, both from the horrors of ordinary life, and the nightmares lurking in the back of his mind.

Randolph Carter would, in time, travel many places, and see things no mortal man ought ever to see. His experiences in forgotten graveyards, adventures to places beyond the very walls of sleep, beyond the outmost rim of the universe itself - And everywhere, he was followed by the necrophagic shadows of Verdun.

[ruinousrealms]

Turka’Ko

It was dark inside the antechamber of Kala Du'n, the greatest and most ancient temple constructed by the pygmy lizard men of Venus. A faint blueish-green light shone through the great doorway, but Corrigan could barely see his hand in front of his face, let alone the famous traps that made this place so feared among Earthmen. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a wriggling thing that, after a bit of shaking, emitted a faint green glow from bioluminescent sacs along the length of its body.

The glow was sufficient to illuminate a few feet ahead, forcing him to take it slow as he advanced into the chamber. He was a tall man, and he had to hunch over slightly to keep from banging his head against the ornamented ceiling tiles. His bomber jacket was soaked from the endless rainstorm outside, unzipped and loose over the loose-fitting cotton garment that Earthmen had to wear in the sweltering humidity. A leather holster hung around his waist, containing an automatic pistol and enough ammunition to halt a pygmy warband in its tracks.

Holding out the living lamp, he could just barely make out a bump on the floor nearby, some sort of raised surface against the otherwise flat floor, worn down by centuries of rainfall leaking through cracks in the roof. Here and there, fallen chunks of stone stood beneath gaping holes, though between the darkening sky and the forest cover, very little light shone through. This wasn't just an errant piece of roof, however – The light was weak, but the hollow-eyed skull of a pygmy tribesman was instantly recognizable.

Tiny eye sockets, a wide mouth full of teeth, a head covered in razor-sharp spines – He hated the little bastards. To him, they resembled nothing less than a loathsome throwback in evolution, a forgotten 'what-if' scenario, if the reptilian domination of the Earth hadn't ended, if mammals found themselves edged out entirely by an ever-diversifying array of cold-blooded creatures. He was hardly the only Earthman to hold such a view. The wriggly creatures were forbidden from stepping within fifty miles of any human settlement, so far away that not even a Guatha bird-thing could fly over undetected.

Swallowing his disgust, he glanced across the skeleton – The green tint came not only from his light source, but from the moss slowly creeping across the bones. This, surprisingly, was a bad sign. Venutian flora grew at an alarming rate, and if these bones were any more than a few days old, they would already be nothing more than mulch beneath a patch of undisturbed moss. None appeared to be broken, though it was hard to tell with their level of decay. He did spot a rusted speartip, and a small piece of blue stone carved in the shape of the Great God Turka'Ko, head of the pygmy pantheon, who the Earthmen called The Father of Toads.

The temple of Kala Du'n was built in the honor of Him, the guardian of the jungles that ringed the equator of the greenhouse world. Ten thousand years had passed since then, and the civilization that built this place – Medieval by human standards, but the most advanced the planet had ever seen until the arrival of Earthmen in the early 20th century – Had long since vanished into myth, while their descendants flopped around in the swamp, sunning themselves on stones and eating raw bloatworms beneath the midnight clouds.

Plucking one of the little fetishes from the floor, he rolled it over in his hand, his fraying gloves leaving a faint residue on the stone. He didn't believe in spook stories, and certainly not in ancient alien gods – But then, creeping through the dimly-lit ruins, listening to the ever-present pounding of the rain outside, it was easy to fall into superstition.

“Turka'Ko Sada,” He muttered the good-luck charm, then tossed the icon aside, hearing it clatter in some unseen corner of the room.

A better equipped explorer wouldn't need to rely on prayers to non-existent gods. If he'd just reported his find to the Venus Colonization Authority, he would've been here with a cadre of armed guards, lighting their way with chemical lamps and exterminating anything in their way with gyrojets. But that would've meant splitting the bounty with others, and forfeiting his right to profit from the sale of the artifacts found therein. Most of the intact ancient temples had already been looted a thousand times over, the artifacts sold or melted down for scrap, the very stones torn apart to build defensive fortifications around remote settlements. Kala Du'n, however, remained undiscovered and undisturbed, even by the pygmies, who only spoke of the place in whispers. Just tracking the place down was an adventure in itself, but now that he was within the crumbling walls of the complex, everything would be worthwhile. All the struggle, all the sacrifice...

Just then, a hissing sound made itself distinct from the background noise, and Corrigan's hand fell to the butt of his pistol. The gun's metal casing was orange with rust, but the internals were made of a plastic composite that was nearly indestructible, and the bullets were caseless explosive charges – One was enough to blow a fist-sized hole in a pygmy's torso, and two could stop a rampaging Gla'a'a in its tracks. Something moved in the darkness, and he let off a shot, the flash nearly blinding him, the sound momentarily reducing his hearing to a low whine. Stone chunks flew up from the floor, pelting his lower legs, and as the glare faded, he thought he caught sight of something long and thin wriggling across the floor, just at the edge of his vision. He didn't panic – He'd faced down jungle critters many a time, and none of them were immune to bullets. It was just a matter of patience, following the sound with his ears rather than his eyes. His finger slowly tightened around the trigger, so that the smallest twitch would loose an explosive bullet straight ahead into the darkness.

He'd been on Venus for the better part of a year, and hadn't had a single cigarette in that time; Tobacco got soggy in the damp climate and lighters rusted away. He hadn't felt a craving in months, but now, the old familiar hunger welled up in his chest. He stuffed the lampworm back into his pocket; In the darkness and tight quarters, a free hand was more valuable than a light. The noise moved around the room, and he followed it, listening to it getting closer until, with a sudden flash, a fireball erupted on a nearby stone tile, a doubleheaded snake found itself separated for the first time. The lone surviving head limped away into the darkness, leaving a trail of acrid-smelling blood and the twitching remains of its fellow. Venom dripped from its fangs. He wished he'd brought a few sample kits; All it took was some basic chemistry to turn it from a deadly poison into a powerful hallucinogen, and it was all the rage with intellectuals and beatniks back on Earth. As it was, he drove his heel down on the head, as he'd prefer not to poke himself on those venomous fangs in the dark.

With that danger out of the way, he was free to continue his exploration. He followed the walls of the room going counterclockwise, his gun at the ready to face any new threats, but none presented themselves. The walls were covered in mottled lumps that had once been carvings, worn away by the eons until they resembled a topographical map of an asteroid. He didn't like them; The water constantly flowing over them gave them a strange, undulating quality that drove a shiver up his spine. About halfway down the farthest wall, he came across an opening, and stepped into a narrow corridor. This was a good sign – The ancient Venutians built their corridors narrow to force religious processions to move slowly and in single file. Just beyond would lay the ritual chamber, and within it, the boundless treasures of a long-dead culture.

He wasn't some vulture, come to strip the bones of the long-deceased – He was only here for a few choice pickings. Ritual masks always sold for a decent amount. Statues of Turka'Ko were also a prized relic, assuming they were in good enough condition and small enough to fit in his canvas army pack. A place like this, undisturbed by Earthmen nor native alike, was bound to be full of treasure. And since he was the only living person who knew the location – The very last, since the old pygmy who initially told him had been slaughtered with the rest of his tribe in retribution for a recent raid on a supply convoy.

This modern-day conquistador adjusted his holster so his gun hung directly in front of his groin, providing easy access and a modicum of protection for his vital parts. He came out of the hallway into a wider room, though his light remained too weak to see much of anything. He caught sight of mottled carvings on the floor stones. Though they were worn, he could still make out a few lines of ancient writing. It was a more refined version of the language the pygmies still spoke, and he was able to read a bit of it.

“Tra'ha d'rl Turka, marnis d'rl zahn,” He read aloud, “Eating-Room of Frog, Hunger Sacrifice.”

The floor slanted upward slightly as he approached what he assumed was a dais or an altar of some kind. There was certainly something ahead of him – He could just barely make out a shape looming up in the darkness. For safety's sake, he drew his gun and fired into the air, using the advanced weapon as an improvised flare gun.

In that momentary flash of light, he saw the vast green mass stretching out before him, rolls of scaly undulating blubber caked in slime. It must've been twenty or thirty feet across, filling a good quarter of the large room. It was only when he saw the head perched atop those stacked chins that he recognized it for what it was. Those bulging eyes, the twin elongated tongues – It all bore a striking resemblance to Turka'Ko, whose visage was unmistakable to any who had spent an appreciable amount of time on the jungle world. This, however, wasn't a mere icon of the ancient Venutian god, but a thing comprised of living flesh!

As the light of the flare died down, Corrigan caught sight of something wiggling free of one of the creature's folds – A snake with a patch of shining scar tissue along the side, which was already beginning to bulge with the first growth of a replacement head. The single remaining head still had fangs. Already paralyzed by fear, Corrigan failed to dodge the leaping serpent, and he let out a howl as the teeth sunk into his leg. His pain was only temporary, however, as the venom's psychoactive effects took hold, and the Earthman found himself sinking into the depths of another nightmare altogether.

The Great God Turka'Ko, Father of Toads, reached down from his pedestal and crushed the Earthman's head like an eggshell. Then, his voluminous stomach grumbling, he pressed the still-twitching body between his lips, and returned to his vigil. In a century or two, the Earthman's soul would be reborn in the form of a wriggling doubleheaded snake, and perhaps lay low one or two of his former fellows. For now the temple fell silent, except for the eternal pounding of the rain.

[ruinousrealms]

A Quick and Easy Guide to Dining at Home

It was Tuesday night when Robin finally decided to eat his girlfriend. He should've been at work an hour ago, but instead, he found himself leaning over the stove, using a wooden spoon to stir a frying pan full of vegetables. Cabbage and onion were his go-to combo. He put them in rice, served them atop a steak or added them to stew. He loved garlic too, big fresh cloves from the farmer's market on the outskirts of town. It was a good hour's walk there, walking along the dirt shoulder of the highway to fill his backpack with all the fresh herbs and vegetables he could carry – And it was a hiking backpack, 50l according to the website, so he could carry a whole lot of em.

Sarah lay on the table, her arms at her sides and her face covered in a checkerboard tea towel. The table was covered in newspapers, and they were covered in blood, black, white, and red all over, as the joke goes. She was a real gusher, both in the bedroom and out, and when Robin drove that fancy Japanese knife into her esophagus, she sprayed like a stuck pig. Thankfully, he was already wearing his apron, but he'd still need to get his shirt drycleaned, and scrubbing the stains out of the carpet wouldn't be much fun.

A long incision ran along the length of her torso, from the base of her neck to just above the waistband of her panties. Her stomach was rounded with the results of a dozen failed diets, but Robin didn't mind. Big girls tasted best. There were few things better than a big flank steak with a nice strip of fat along the side, and little white lines running through the meat, except for maybe the whiskey he was looking forward to pairing with it, a very nice quarter cask Laphroaig.

The steak sat in a bowl that wasn't quite big enough for it, leaving the tip poking up like a red iceberg in a sea of brown, brackish water. It was a simple but effective marinade, just some thyme and Worcester sauce, along with a few drops of olive oil. Setting down his spoon, Robin left the veggies to sizzle in their coconut oil and fumbled around in a drawer till he found a pair of tongs. The bottom portion of the steak looked almost fully cooked, with the brown sauce so deeply inundating the meat, but the upper quarter was still completely raw, and so he simply flipped it over and left it to soak.

After a while, the veggies were almost done, so he flipped the dial to low heat and added a little splash of amontillado to hold them over. He placed the steak in a pan and stuck it in the oven to start with – Just to start, of course, he wasn't one of those savages who cooked their steaks all the way through. Then, grabbing a swig from the half-empty wine bottle, he returned to his girlfriend and picked up where he'd left off.

A human body has many prime cuts – A nice belly steak, like the one he was making, was perfect for an evening at home, whereas the thighs and buttocks were nice and juicy. This was where he began his work, making long, careful cuts with a practiced hand, wrapping fist-sized chunks of flesh in brown paper and tying it up with twine. By the time the steak was ready, he'd already filled a container with the brown packages, and carried it over to the deep freeze, which sat in the back of the pantry, humming faintly. One by one, he placed the steaks in their designated basket, and as he did so, he felt a cat rubbing against his ankles.

“Hey, little Lizzie,” He cooed, crouching down and stroking the tabby's soft fur as she let out a long, low purr, “Little Lizzie Borden, you want a treat? Just wait a moment, daddy's got a treat for you.”

Reaching into his pocket, Robin pulled out one of Sarah's earlobes, the scar still fresh from where he'd gotten frustrated and ripped out her earring, and Little Lizzie let out an eager meow. “Catch!” He tossed it to her, and she leapt up and caught it in midair, sinking her long fangs into the tough flesh. Then, as she always did, the feline purred and slunk off into the shadows to enjoy her prize.

Sarah looked a lot less pretty without her ears, he found, so he went ahead and covered her face up with the towel. As he returned to his cooking, however, he felt the urge to lift it up and take a peek. Yep, she was a real looker – It was a shame he'd be slicing up her face and smoking the juicy bits in the big kiln he'd built on the roof. It took a bit of convincing for the building superintendent to let him install that big brick oven, but after a couple of nice dinners, he was given the go-ahead. That man... Robin couldn't help but snort. He wouldn't know good food if it bit him on the dick. The fat old Turk ate a soup made from a homeless man's ass and acted like it was some sort of culinary revelation. When he asked for another bowl, Robin had to cough to keep from laughing.

The steak was a bit overdone, but still red on the inside, and that's what mattered. Transferring it to the pan, he added another splash of wine, then turned the heat up and let it boil away, searing the exterior and leaving the inside of the steak as pink as if she had just climbed out of bed. That reminded him, he'd have to change the bedsheets. Every woman's last living act was to void her bowels. Honestly, no manners.

As he scooped the steak and veggies onto a plate, he noticed Lizzie returning from her snack, licking her chops as she trotted up to the table and hopped onto a chair; Then, after a moment's hesitation, she leapt atop the table and curled up between Sarah's outspread legs, only to be shooed away a moment later. Robin wouldn't have minded if not for the bloody newspaper she was laying on; She was a good girl, but she always hated bathtime, and scrubbing congealed blood out of fur was a bitch and a half in itself.

Leaning back on the sofa, he sipped his scotch and flipped through a few channels. The news – Bad, as always. Some fucking religious thing, another nameless preacher shouting “Haw-Lay-Lew-Yuh!” and showing off the scars from his latest round of botched plastic surgery. After a few more flips, he paused, and moved back one channel – Jodie Foster gasped and staggered through a darkened basement, looking like a ghost in the green night vision filter. She looked good back then – He'd have taken her to dinner in a second, given the chance.

An erection began to form in his pants, and he poured another glass of scotch. The full moon shone through the window, half-obscured by the shadowy buildings across the street. Buffalo Bill cocked his gun, and Clarise spun around and fired all her rounds.

“One of these days,” He mumbled through a mouthful of steak, “That might be me.”

The thought made his cock jump. What a lovely night to have a curse.

[ruinousrealms]

The skeleton dance is a sacred Tibetan dance ritual, from Himalayan Buddhist traditions. It reflects how everything is transitory including one’s body. The monk pictured in the above photo seems to be performing the dance known as Durdak Garcham, or “Dance of the Lords of the Cemetery.” Durdak Garcham celebrates the liberation that comes from acceptance of our impermanence.

Taken in 1925, these photographs were published in National Geographic in its November 1928 issue.

[ruinousrealms]

Five Men in an Old House

Another day, another mass suicide. It was almost becoming routine, sweeping through abandoned warehouses, decrepit old mansions, and tagging and bagging a dozen or more stiffs. Sometimes, you found one that was still warm – But never a live one. They were good at it, swallowing poison and blowing their brains out at the same time. If one of them fucked up and hit some non-vital part part of the brain, the poison would stop their heart, and if the resident chemist's formula was a bit off, the sudden application of lead to the cerebellum was usually enough to drop them.

The job never got easier. Two cops, a pair of paramedics, and an assistant coroner stood in the foyer of an old Victorian mansion, surrounded by the naked bodies of more than a dozen practitioners of some alternative religion. The responders almost didn't seem to notice them, standing in their own circle around the remains of an old Chippendale sofa, rotten beyond recognition by decades of neglect.

“So, who is it this time?” Constable Bradski asked, an almost casual tone in his voice as he glanced across the sea of corpses, arranged in a semi-circle around a hole in the floor where a staircase had once been.

“The 'Order of Unified Flesh',” Carston replied with a yawn. He was the assistant coroner, and he was dragged out of bed for this when the real coroner's phone went to voicemail. The old man never liked these sorts of cases; Too many loose ends, too much inexplicable shit. Carston didn't like it either, but he liked being woken at two AM and being forced to drive halfway across the city even less.

“More fish-fuckers?” Sergeant Dally proffered a pack of gum to everyone present; When nobody accepted the offer, he stuffed it back into his pocket, grumbling.

"The Order of Dagon? Nah, those guys don't do this shit, they just go swimming and never come back up for air."

One of the paramedics, a fat man with a mustache and a nametape reading 'Gillespe', responded, “They moved in about a year ago, something about 'special energies' emanating from something the old owner hauled up from the sea.”

The others, his partner included, glanced at him strangely, and he added, “Read about it in the news. Doesn't anybody read the paper anymore?”

“Don't be hard on em,” Dally patted him on the shoulder, “They're just kids. They don't know anything they haven't read about on Facebook.”

“It's 2018,” Bradski said, “Who the hell uses Facebook anymore?”

“I wonder why they never fixed the place up,” Carston glanced around the room, “It's almost like they never bothered. You think they were planning this from the start?”

The place was in rough shape, to say the least. The mansion had three floors once, but the top one was partially caved in, and the second story was so ramshackle that one could look up and see the night sky though the holes. The floor was in no better condition, with gaps in the rotten hardwood big enough to swallow a man, descending into the black pit of the basement. In the center of the foyer was a gaping hole, where the grand staircase had once been; Now, there was only a cheap aluminum ladder giving access to the lower floor, around which the ring of corpses was centered.

“Could be,” Gillespie's partner shrugged, “Or maybe they just didn't care.”

“Hey, you know the history of the place, right?” He turned and glanced at the big hole, light from his flashlight glinting off the ladder, “What do you mean about the basement?”

“Well,” Gillespie stroked his mustache thoughtfully, “The place used to be owned by the captain of a fishing schooner. Weird guy, apparently he collected all sorts of shit from his voyages, like jewels and necklaces and some weird little reptiles that nobody could quite identify. Went missing sometime after World War 2, when his health was starting to fail. Some kinda skin condition made him lock himself up inside his home, and then one day, Con Edison showed up to cut off the power and nobody was home.”

“Yeah, and?”

“And there was something in the basement that the cult cared about. Look, it was months ago that I read it. Check tomorrow's paper, they'll probably print the whole thing. Fucking ghouls,” He added under his breath.

“It's probably just some bullshit,” His partner said wryly, “They killed themselves when they realized they'd shelled a hundred thousand dollars for a ruin and some not-so-prime real estate.”

“I'd kill myself too if I had to live in a place like this,” Carston concurred, “This is some Addams Family shit, right here.”

The others nodded in assent. For a moment, the conversation died down, and in the silence, an unusual sound was heard, a faint, near-inaudible noise rising up from somewhere below. Bradski noticed it first, glancing down at the floor. It was a sort of sloshing sound, interspersed with odd little 'pops', like bubbles rising and bursting in a pot of boiling water. The more he listened, the louder it seemed to get, and the more certain he was that something was going on beneath them.

“You guys hear that? Sounds kinda like water.”

“We're a mile from the beach,” Dally shrugged, “It's the wind.”

“But the trees aren't moving,” Bradski insisted, pointing out the front doorway. True to his word, the row of overgrown maples lining the driveway were as still as statues, without so much as a leaf falling to disturb the cool night air.

“We've got fourteen stiffs and a lot of paperwork to fill out,” One of the paramedics said, “Anyone up for a smoke?”

“Ain't saying no to that,” Dally agreed.

The three of them turned and left together, but Bradski stayed behind. Carston lingered a moment too, glancing nervously down one of the many holes, and turning to Bradski with a look that wasn't quite as skeptical as he probably hoped it was.

“You really think there's something down there?” He asked, tugging down the hem of his coat.

“It's probably nothing. I just want to have a look, that's all,” Bradski fiddled with the head of his flashlight, focusing the spread into a single arrow-like beam of light, “If I see anything, I'll radio Sergeant Dally.”

“Should I come with you?”

“Thanks, but it's probably nothing. Maybe they left bathwater running or something. You know how these guys are.”

“I don't, actually.”

The constable made his way over to the hole, carefully picking his way between the dead cultists, and the coroner followed close behind. Each one lay naked and face-up, their mouths ringed with dry spittle and a single gunshot wound in their foreheads. The executioner lay at the far end of the half-circle, with his toe firmly stuck in the trigger loop of an old hunting carbine.

Later on, it would be their job to bag and tag them – After the CSI team showed up and did their work. In truth, what Bradski was doing was better suited to their expertise – Certainly, Carston would've been content with waiting outside for them to arrive, but as the constable crouched by the hole, shining his light into the darkness, he realized there was no dissuading him.

Once again, Carston made the offer to help, but Bradski brushed him off. He held the ladder steady as the officer descended into the inky black depths of the mansion's basement, the cheap aluminum rattling with every step. He half expected the thing to snap and send Bradski headlong into the gloom, but it held out until he reached the floor a good ten feet below.

He was still visible, if only barely, with the front of his body vaguely illuminated by the back glow of the flashlight. He glanced around, waving the flashlight back and forth, and shrugging, looked up at Carston, swinging the flashlight instinctively and nearly blinding the man.

“Sorry!” He called up, “You wait outside, I'll call if I need help.”

Nodding, the assistant coroner joined the others on the front porch. The grounds of the mansion were beautiful once, before his father was even born; Nowadays, the garden was an ugly mass of brambles, and the once-stately maples lining the driveway were crooked and overgrown, leaning over the cracked cobblestones and shedding reddened leaves like dripping blood.

“So, you hear about that murder-suicide the other night?” Dally was saying, waving a Canadian Classic rather emphatically, “Fella ties his up his wife, takes a bucket full of painkillers, and drives off a bridge with her stuck in the trunk. They didn't even know she was in there till the car was being searched down at the chop shop,” He chuckled, taking a long drag from his cigarette, “Bet the boys were pretty surprised.”

“That's something, alright,” Gillespie agreed, “But listen, last week? I get this call for a nonresponsive elderly male, vital signs unknown. So I get down there, and I shit you not – The guy's completely mummified, sitting in the kitchen with a hot pocket in front of him. He's clearly been dead for weeks, but the hot pocket is freshly cooked, still steaming from the microwave. The guy who found him, his grandson – Well, he was high on something. He'd apparently been in and out, only stopping by to sleep off a bender, and when he saw his grandpa sitting there, he thought the old guy was hungry!”

He slapped his knee and laughed, joined by Dally and the assistant coroner. The other paramedic didn't seem to care much for the story, simply taking a pull from his vape and glancing down at his phone.

“The hot pocket was shit,” Gillespie made an exaggerated gagging sound, “Poutine flavor.”

“Ever been to that restaurant down on Allenby street?” Carston said, “They've got good poutine, more cheese and gravy than you can shake a-”

Before he could finish, there was a scream from inside, slightly muffled by the distance, but it was clearly Bradski's voice. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, not bothering to use the radio, with unmistakable and absolute fright. Dally's gun was out of the holster before he even crossed the threshold. Within moments, the four were back at the hole.

Bradski wasn't at the ladder, nor was he within sight of the weak beams of their flashlights. He was nearby, somewhere beyond the yawning rim of the pit, and no amount of shouting on their part could coax anything but raw, inarticulate screams from him. The paramedics slid down the ladder and disappeared, the glow of their flashlights almost disappearing entirely as they ran toward the source of the screaming.

“The fuck?” Gillespie shouted, “That's not him-!”

His words were cut off by a gunshot, followed by a scream from the other paramedic. Carston and Dally could hear his footsteps as he ran toward the ladder, and when he emerged he leapt onto it, the cheap frame buckling but not breaking under his weight. He started to climb, frantic half-sobs rising from his throat with every rung, and both of the men reached out to help him up. His face was cast down, but Carston caught a glimpse of it and gasped. He recognized the outline of that face – It belonged not to the paramedic, but a drunk driver he'd autopsied more than a week prior. In the flash of the torch, he could see the groove in the man's forehead where his skull had impacted the steering wheel.

“Christ!” He exclaimed, withdrawing his hand. Sergeant Dally looked to him, but didn't withdraw his hand, and the thing-that-wasn't-a-paramedic lunged at him, grabbing his arm with both hands and pulling him down. Dally shouted in surprised fury more than fear, and did his best to grab on to the edge of the broken boards, but the rotten wood crumbled beneath his fingertips. Grabbing him by the belt, Carston tried to haul him back up, but the weight against him suddenly increased, and the officer let out a shriek of pain. Bone snapped as Dally's forearm disappeared in the gloom, or so it seemed to Carston; The officer raised the stump of an arm cleanly amputated at the elbow, blood spurting across the floor; Then, with a howl that seemed almost inhuman, he topped headlong into the black abyss.

Carston nearly went with him, but the shock was enough to loosen his deathgrip on the officer's belt. He fell back, nearly landing on one of the dead cultists. He hand brushed the arm of the corpse, and instead of cold flesh in the grip of rigor mortis, the flesh felt warm, supple – The dead man's fingers twitched slightly, and a dry rasping sound came from his mouth.

A similar noise came from Carston's mouth, though this one was tinged with fright – More than fright, a sense of absolute terror rushed through his body, stronger than anything he'd ever felt before. His brain pulsed madly, pain arcing through his head as his heart pounded in his ears, but the sound was nearly drowned altogether as the rest of the bodies began gasping for air.

A drumroll rang out as, together, their hands and feet began to twitch, then pound against the floor as life returned unbidden to their mortal forms. Carston tried not to look – Tried not to notice the cracking open of an eye. Scrambling back, he tried to get up, but his legs just wouldn't cooperate, and all he could do was scoot back across the floor, away from the bodies and the pit. His chest grew tight, blackness beginning to infringe upon his vision, but he couldn't afford to pass out, not now – He heard the noise coming from beneath the floorboards, the same wet, bubbling sound that Bradski mentioned, and something not altogether human began to emerge from the pit.

It wore a police badge and carried a gun and part of it was clearly Bradski, but the screaming was Dally and the sputtering, wobbling mass of gelatinous flesh belonged to Gillespie. The mass walked and oozed, three legs on the floor and another three in the air, kicking, along with something that wasn't quite an arm and wasn't quite a penis.

It seethed forth, the floorboards creaking under the accumulated weight of four men. The thing's belly dragged across the ground as it moved, but it wasn't looking at Carston, rather, all nine eyes were focused on the nearest resurrected cultist.

“Yahtagan, yagrohan,” Came the sound from the creature's throat, which was matched by an identical exclamation from the corpse. The dead man sat straight up, wrapping his arms around the mass, and slowly, ropes of gelatinous flesh oozed across his body, knitting themselves together piecemeal.

“The ladder,” Carston muttered to himself, “Help me down the ladder.”

He glanced at the far side of the pit, where the cultist with the rifle was rising up. His toe was bloated and purple, wedged firmly in the rifle's trigger loop – Not that he considered trying it, even for a moment. Such rational thought was beyond him, if rational the thought were. Horror and repulsion rose alongside the bile in his throat. His conscious mind was paralyzed, unable to move, and through the fog of absolute impossibility, an instinct boiled to the surface.

Rising from the murk of a thousand centuries of evolution, it took control easily, settling itself into the unoccupied driver's seat with the same ease as it once enjoyed when men were monkeys. Gazing across the scene before it, this instinctual drive gave him a single command, which his body obeyed without question – To run.

Carston got up in an instant and bolted, vaulting rather than skirting a gap in the floorboards. Out the door, down the creaking wooden steps – He could hear it behind him, the sloshing, gurgling, sometimes speaking thing, the voices of men he'd barely known, and some unfamiliar ones, ones that he'd never heard before except in his deepest, most obscure nightmares.

Across the driveway now, and scrambling into the unlocked police car, Carston slammed the door, forcing his eyes away from whatever was going on within that charnal house. For just a moment, he sat there, staring at the empty ignition with a sense of dull disappointment. Then, the radio crackled to life, a cacophony of voices screaming meaningless numbers.

“10-33 – 10-38 - 10-38 - 10-38 – 10-89 -”

Police codes, he realized - Officer in need of assistance - Fatality - Fatality - Fatality - Sexual crime...

The noise was so loud that he could hear it from inside the house as well as through the speakers. He glanced up without thinking, and what he saw made him turn and vomit. Through the chaos, the voices of confused dispatchers and officers could be heard trying and failing to shout over the onslaught, yet barely able to make their voices heard above the static hiss emanating from the overloaded speakers.

Desperation clutched him, and he moved to grab the handset, but a cold, black-skinned hand suddenly clutched his wrist. It was black – Not brown, but pitch black, barely visible in the darkness except where it interrupted his hand from the arm. Slowly, his fingers relaxed, and the stranger's did too, letting his arm fall limp on the console between seats.

Looking up, he beheld a man, or at least the general shape of one, outlined against the distant lights of the city. The color of his eyes wasn't quite red, nor was it blue, and Carston felt himself unable to look away. He felt a sense of magnetism, as if he were being drawn into those noctilucent eyes, and when a smile appeared on the man's face, it shone with the light of an aurora.

“Hast thou ever seen beyond the plateau of Leng?” The stranger asked, his voice a cool, crisp monotone.

Behind him, Carston noticed the lights moving across the city. One by one, distant buildings seemed to shift places, the lights of residential towers bursting apart into clouds of stars and reshaping themselves, forming the shapes of constellations both strange and familiar. Where the big harbor tower stood – Whose name he knew but could never remember – He could make out the distinct shape of the Big Dipper.

The city didn't exist. The stars began to shimmer, blackness once again forming around the edges of his vision. A faint mist rose up before his eyes, and he looked down to see his legs, or rather, a pair of empty jeans falling slack on the floor.

Raising a hand before his face, Carston looked at his fingers uncomprehendingly as each one disappeared, burning down like candles into a fine powder, which itself melted into nothingness before hitting the floor. He looked up at the stranger, who smiled down with an expression at once comforting and mocking.

“You don't exist,” It replied to his unspoken question.

And then, he never had.

[ruinousrealms]

you know what i really want? a modern dudebro vampire. just a typical obnoxious straight boy in a neon tank top and cargo shorts who also happens to be a creature of the night.

“okay, dude, i’m only feeding on you ‘cause i’m starving and there aren’t any hot girls around. no homo.” “wait, you’re gonna suck my blood?” “no, i’m gonna drink your blood. i don’t suck, that’s gay. don’t make this weird, bro”

“ah, i see you’re staring pensively out the window, chad. ruminating on the curse of your newfound immortality?” “nah man, it’s just… i got, like, some flecks of blood on my adidas while i was feeding and they haven’t come out…”

“we do not drink… wine.” “okay but is beer cool? and can we still smoke weed?”

he joins a 24-hour gym because being undead and allergic to sunlight is no excuse for skipping leg day. tragic music swells as he looks over his “sun’s out guns out” tanks (he has seven of them). his coven is a fraternity. someone make this happen

[ruinousrealms]

A Tatar shaman in Minusinsk, Siberia ca. 1910

via reddit

[ruinousrealms]

B&W is a must

[ruinousrealms]

Happy 128th birthday, HP Lovecraft!

He’s not gone. He’s just waiting for the stars to align once again.