I AM A DARK MAN.

in them she saw a black glee that danced endlessly like the legs of a man fresh through the trapdoor in a gibbet platform.

there’s a narrative about the devil, this idea that he was once beautiful – fallen, in his splendor. jonah knows better. the son of a bitch has always been ugly as tar, hideous as sin. he knows, because he sees that man’s face in the goddamn mirror every morning, noon, and night. nights, like tonight, swollen in shadow and sticky with an unearthly humidity. hell’s own ambience, for what it’s worth. and what it’s worth, is all of spit.

his name, said on the tip of shark’s teeth, all heat and blood, ruminating in a mixture of sitting - out - for days under the summer sun. it’d made him nauseous the first time, a gut punch for the unholy.  ❝  i’d say y’ look good, boss, but –  ❞  hands are in his pockets, fingering the solid metal of a lighter, a pack of cigarettes, keys, gum, and a wad of bills wrapped in a rubber band. the starter pack for anyone looking for a way out of mortality. brow crooks, hanging at a lazy salute on his forehead. there’s a working toward rebellion, maintaining his composure under the fizzle and fitz of popping streetlights. but he knows; the devil always does.  ❝  even i ain’t that good a liar.  ❞

The devil isn’t a man, Herr Reintzel. The devil’s a place. The devil’s a thought. The devil’s a crossroads that drowned, the devil’s the dust mixed with the blood. The devil is you, Herr Reintzel. 

The devil is you. 

Unfortunate: what Jonah says makes his face break into a smile. Shattered from cheek to cheek, opened in the lips to show all teeth. All sharp, sharp teeth. Then comes the chuckle, low and throaty: a body splits if it’s left in the heat too long, and the stinking entrails spill into the night air, shrill and sharp, to worm their way under Jonah’s skin. 

“Herr Reintzel, won’t you offer this poor wanderer a light?”

Sticky dark. All teeth, all bite: dark yawned below a bloodlet moon, exsanguinated. Pale like the eye of the world. From the shadows comes a Beast, Creature.

His eyes shine in that dark like the tip of a cigarette. Winked out of existence by that sharp gibbet grin of his. When he moves away from the streetcorner wall the shadow follows him, crowding at his feet. Stuck to the heel of his boot. Humming softly: the streetlights squirm against the asphalt so they don't have to illuminate his face.

MURDER BALLADS OF 1816. | (SELECTIVELY) ACCEPTING. 

@imbricare​ / bev keane said: By the lamb are we saved.

“Bitti.”

He speaks not with the tongues of man, not with the movement of its lips, not with the echo in a voicebox. No language of Abraham courses through those teeth, sharp teeth. No knowledge of the alef in this form. Just blood, the earliest writing of it all: in grooves torn from Adam’s rib the Lord wrote Eve’s name a thousand times. 

He was there at the heart of the universe when it happened. He ate the vowels before they could become consonant, and curled around the branches of an apple tree like fingers to a lover’s neck. To choke. 

Beverly Keane shivers when she thinks that voice inside herself. It is a moment, something like weakness, and when she finds it she drowns it with both hands. Those who saw an angel of the Lord feared first, and then they were delivered. She was deathly afraid the first time and allowed herself that fear but only once.

Anything else after that would be weakness.

No mercy here because mercy is the prerogative of the living. The dead of Jericho Hill have none to give; and the char-devar of Walter’s making is devoid of such base dichotomies. The char-devar of Walter’s making is beyond the waters of the world. 

Cuthbert drowned and is drowning still, in a haze of loss he has not, might never, fully register as his own. Behind the Man in Black, a chiming alert on Scowther’s wrist device pulls the good doctor back into a spotlight he reverently wishes isn’t his. Scrambling, he turns the beeping off. It’s a high emergency alert for Thunderclap Station (otherwise known as Blue Heaven, Algul Siento, and to a select few, Devar-Toi) – but he’s with the Boss, and when he’s with the Boss, alerts ain’t meant to happen.

“Apologies,” a breathless wheeze, “sir–” 

In the confusion of the moment, Cuthbert does the stupidest thing he could do: He rolls sideways, tries to stumble out of the bed he’s in. 

The world’s a blur. He can’t keep himself on his feet, not when his blood runs thin like it does, not when Rudin Filaro took his eye and Walter Padick will take his bones, his hope, his dignity. 

The unhinging begins here. Split jaw peels back, reality recoiled. The low roar from the Wizard’s throat is enough to silence Scowther, to make that little man curl back and cower. A reckoning storm in the Man in Black’s eyes. A red, red revelry of anger as he turns to stare at his good doctor. Scowther silences the pager. Scowther shrinks into the shadows and hopes to disappear.

“Leave us,” the animal unholy says.

He doesn’t have to ask Scowther twice. The man scuttles away, closer to the rat-headed creatures he has to work with daily than to a man, back into the bowels of Fedic, this concrete realm where this mad jester runs amok and, eyeless, is King. The great heavy door closes behind him, the internal mechanism locking onto the noise coming from Walter’s throat. That growl that spilled before from him to Scowther now bends, under the weight of the terrible thing emitting it.

What laughs is not a laugh but drowning children clawing at the hand that pushes them beneath the waves. What laughs is like a wail, the death of summer. If Cuthbert looks at him straight on from down the floor the lips split past the face in laughter, the eyes bloodshot, a mouth red. Red. The noise of dead things that have forgotten they are dead. The laugh like braying of the slaughtered deer. At the end of this lost highway the creature is on all fours and he eats the roadkill doe. It lifts its head in the light of the headlights. No skin to cover flesh. No mask, o Death. The jaws wet with crimson gristle. Worse than crucifixion.

Teeth.

Those yellowed nails capable of peeling sanity from mind now grip Cuthbert’s arm to steady him. At eye-level the Man looks almost real, almost human. Close enough to see the Gaunt cheeks and those bloodshot eyes. His other hand wipes the slick of sweat from Cuthbert’s forehead.

“Come, pup. Let me show you what wonders I have made.”

He lifts Cuthbert up, uncaring for the wound or for the pain, and opens the door which was locked with no key that can be seen, no key that isn’t darkness. 

@charyka | ♫

an arm insinuates, slithers, settles around the pair of shoulders. the dark is heavy, weighted and wanting. one finger spins, a spiral, round and round, like that fated wheel.  "  let’s talk of family values,  "  the voice, a hiss, a pinprick that bleeds across vinyl. the snake at your door, the fruit ripe for the swallow. there is a 𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚖𝚜 that spreads, all teeth and no tongue on the first date.  "  while we sit and watch the slaughter.  "

Mr Door, meet Mr Scratch. Cut from the same cloth, coagulated from the same hell. What sticks to the ribs just dies much slower: what dies can never live (HARTMAN WAS S T R E T C H E D!) 

Teeth, too many teeth, and grins, too many eyes, ribs jutting out the back like antlers (have you seen Dr Hartman lately?). Scratch wears the skin of his own image (did he who made the lamb make thee?) so Mr Door wears nothing but a cloak of black, deep red where the eyes are. His lord is Crimson. His Resonance is Poison.

Mr Scratch, cut from the darkness Same cloth, different trim. But the Door’s power’s always been crimson, crimson, crimson, yawning like a mouth that’s never fed.

an earworm is a tune you can’t stop humming, baby baby baby --