CHAPTER FOUR
There was darkness, followed by a blinding light. Next my eyes opened, and every thing was clearer than it had ever been. So clear, that I could distinguish the spaces between the cracks in the stone walls on the far side of the chamber. Everything had changed, yet stayed the same. Statues seemed to move, but didn’t. It’s something that no human can ever know.
The Guardian stood among what was left of our bodies, reveling in his victory. He’d removed the blade from his Heart and it was as unmarred as when we’d first arrived. His bellow clipped short and he looked down. An arm was sticking out of his chest. He followed the arm up to the body to the eyes and there was this look on his face as he stared at me. It was a look of confusion like he couldn’t understand what was happening to him. I didn’t understand the look. Everyone dies, why was he so surprised it was happening to him?
I tore the heart from his body, and watched as his body convulsed like he was having a grand mal seizure or dying from strychnine poisoning. He decayed right before my very eyes. His body shrunk in on itself as if he were dying of consumption. The near skeletal remains exploded into black and scarlet motes and he was gone from this world as if he’d never existed.
I licked the blood from my fingers, and then the realization of what just happened flooded into me. I took a deep shaking breath in preparation then dropped to my knees to let out one long ragged scream after another.
I looked at the blood on my hands.
I shrieked as if I could scream the pain out of me.
I looked at the carnage all around me.
I screamed long, hopeless, pitiful screams.
I looked to my fiancé who was nothing more than so much ground meat.
And nothing more came out but hoarse squeaks.
Finally, I threw up and the world went all Starry Night. Blackness ate at the edges of my vision then there was nothingness again.
When I regained consciousness there were dried streams that ran down the sides of my face. As I was recovering from the grogginess of unconsciousness I got up and stumbled outside to the jungle. The sun was low in the sky stuck between twilight and true dark.
I began to feel something rise to the surface, swimming up through me frantically like a diver deep under the surface desperate for air. I closed my eyes and I could almost see it as a pit. An expanse so dark it was like an inky ocean of blackness. It was filled with shimmering color like an oil slick.
I thought, “How could something be so dark and shimmer,” but the thought faded as something rose up out of the darkness.
It was nothing I could see with my eyes, but that didn’t make it any less real. It began to pace in the darkness like some giant predator pacing its cage at the zoo. You could sense it was something that wasn’t used to being trapped. It knew freedom and it would be damned if it stayed captive. Like any animal not yet broken it tested its boundaries, it slashed the bars of its cage. The problem is that that cage was me.
The pain didn’t build it exploded. I was suddenly overcome with agony so immense by spine bowed while I was still standing. I didn’t so much collapse as my body slammed into the ground as if I had fallen from a great height. It wasn’t a sharp pain or burning or any kind of pain that I had words for. It just was. It existed as the pure essence of anguish. I offered my body the only release I could think of.
I screamed.
It was a piercing shriek of a sound that my human throat had never been able to make. It was a sound like something that would come out of a leopard but that wasn’t exactly it either, and I could swear that under that there were the distant screams of thousands other of people; it swept over the land like a great tempest and it sent birds fluttering.
My own voice brought something to my attention the absence of sound that I remember from walking through this jungle was no more. It was like everything was in hyper-focus. I could hear the fluttering heart beat of the birds flying away. I could hear the quickening breath of the small animals in the trees as if they could sense a predator near.
Sight had become secondary; the night was alive with sounds and smells. I could smell the animals creeping just behind the trees like some curtain covering a buffet. I could have everything out here. Own it in a way that human beings rarely think about owning things anymore.
My outburst must have attracted some attention because I could hear one more thing the rhythmic march of visitors. But as loud as the breathing and stomping was it was distant somewhere behind that curtain of arboreal infinity. I said out loud in barely a whisper how I could own all that beautiful life because, own, was too complicated a concept. But there was something else something much simpler that they could be.
“Prey…”
I gave myself over to the jungle like you do to water when you are swimming. And the same as water the trees flowed around me in that liquid grace. I was suddenly aware of every stone and stump, every root and branch. I flowed through the trees like a ghost or the wind or something equally as intangible.
Once I began moving though I couldn’t stop or slow down or rather didn’t want to. As a matter of fact I just kept going faster and faster. It felt so good to give myself over to the movement. I was moving so fast that the birds around me appeared to be suspended in mid-flight, and my speed was still increasing. I was unstoppable but just as I began to appreciate my new athletic achievement an obstacle.
“Humph… obstacle, ri-ight,” I thought.
It was damn near a mountain.
Needless to say, I stopped but I stopped inches from the wall with out even a hint of slowing down. I wasn’t breathing hard, winded, or tired in anyway. That was odd enough but it was what happened next that was the most disturbing.
I heard the footsteps and breathing again but this time they were accompanied by heartbeats many, many heartbeats. I heard them surround me, and salivating at the mouth. I could feel them; feel their need, their hunger. They were barely human just another kind of beast of the jungle.
I was surrounded by a horde of savages with blood on their breath, and I could guess what kind. They would like nothing better than to devour my flesh and keep my head as a trophy; however that was what we had in common. Disturbed yet?
I began to feel something, something that I had never felt before. It was not a good feeling; as a matter of fact, it was a very, very bad feeling. Heat rose up through my skin. It was like fire ants marching up and down my arms and across my back and face.
I could say I was filled with hatred, malice and contempt. But that didn’t quite do it justice. The breeze felt cool against my hot skin because all that consumed me was pure rage.
My mind went to an empty place. It was that blackness in me, filled with nothing. No anger, no fear, no love, nothing just a kind of white noise, staticky. For a second I wondered if this was what it felt like to go crazy. If it was I could live with that.
I laughed. It was a deep throaty sound, touchable and close, full of promises meant for darkened bedrooms. It was a familiar sound that was never mine nor the words that followed, “Such a nice day for a bloodbath.”
It was as if I stepped outside of myself and watched from afar as my body took control of itself in a merciless, bloody slaughter.
My eyes switched into slow motion, but that didn’t mean that I did. Actually it was precisely the opposite. My movements were so quick that all they saw was a blur, a wave of invisible death. I became a death dealer and for them it came swift, cold, and brutal.
I repelled off of the rock with such force that I was momentarily airborne. Traveling though the air horizontally I gave the one closest to me a blow to his chest with my feet.
I struck him with enough drive that I crushed his breastbone, ribs, and the heart that lie beneath. He flew back, hard, crushing the three men that were behind him, finally slamming into a tree and collapsing it onto the jungle floor. I didn’t waste the momentum, with unnatural agility I twisted my body and mule kicked the head off the man adjacent to him.
My body was instinctively moving in ways that it had never moved. Upon landing I struck three men in the throat crushing three consecutive windpipes. My movements were as fluid and elegant as a dance that I had practiced thousands of times before. After that minor display the smart ones ran, but they could not escape my wrath. A battle ensued and they were only the first victims.
I looked around sizing up my prey and it looked as if they weren’t moving at all. I had enough time to carefully plan out how vicious to be. And I planned to be incredibly vicious.
I took two heads and smashed them into a third one; they dropped to the ground with their brains hanging over their collars, moistening the grass with their blood. I relieved the fallen of their weapons: one hatchet, a ritual knife carved from human bone, and a razor sharp throwing disk.
I chucked the axe at the deserters and split them in half like firewood. Their blood splashed on the ground like warm water from a broken fire hose.
Next the razor disk, it had an interesting ricochet effect, cleaving multiple skulls like pudding before getting jammed in a tree. And then… there were three…
They bolted to the protection of the trees where they had the advantage.
“Yea…advantage.”
I couldn’t help but smirk at the prospect of them feeling safe among the trees. High above the ground I leapt through the canopy. I caught up to the first one with very little effort. I waited until he had stopped to rest then dropped straight down and sliced him in half with the bone-knife.
Back in the treetops I found the other one resting a few hundred yards away crying.
I could smell the fear on him like some bittersweet perfume. I knew that the fear made the blood sweeter with adrenaline. I knew exactly how it would taste. I don’t know whose memory I was channeling but I knew that I have never thought of blood in that way. But the sensory memory was so strong I had to blink twice just to make sure I wasn’t someplace else… someone else.
I dropped down hanging from the branch with my legs. He looked into my eyes and I was going to let him live but suddenly flashes of him murdering and gorging himself on innocent people raced through my mind. The rage welled up inside of me again and I snapped his head all the way around and he slumped lifeless to the ground but I had already caught up to the last one by that time.
He was determined; he was still running. He hadn’t stopped once but he was not near fast enough to evade me. I landed right on top of him. He seemed to be headed for a clearing, a village.
“Aw, too bad, you were almost there,” I said sarcastically, “You thought that you would be safe among the trees, that if you could just get back to your village you would escape me. Silly rabbit…”
He started to whimper, “Ang Diyabla,” he continued to snivel; “I do not want to die.”
My nails dug into the tender flesh of his throat and a small stream of crimson fluid ran down the side of my hand. I looked at the big pulse in his throat. I watched it jump under the surface like some trapped thing. I wanted to help it free. The more I looked at his throat the thinner his skin seemed to get. Until I could smell the blood beneath the surface, hot with fear. I felt a need so strong, a need that didn’t exactly have to do with sex or hunger but something akin to both.
I looked at the blood I drew from him in a new way, not as that vile necessity, but something more inviting, more attractive. I started to see food. Releasing my grip I tasted the sweet nectar. It was incredible, I looked down at him from atop his chest and bent forward placing my lips inches from his quivering ear lobe and grimly replied, “Then…you should have never been born.”
Once again the words aren’t mine.
I sunk my teeth into his supple throat and allowed the sweet flow to drain down into my body. It was hot and thick. It tasted sweet and metallic. I was entranced by it. I felt a pull and the air became thick with something. It pushed against me as I tried breath against it. It was like a wall but there was nothing to see. There was a pull to him and something inside me pulled back. Then as that throb in his chest slowed to a flutter I felt its grip grow weak and with one last rasping exhale from him I pulled all that power from both of us back into myself. It was wondrous.
Suddenly, the tortuous assault returned. It felt like something was trying to rip out of me. This time, however, the pain manifested itself in a more physical form. In one last eruption of excruciating pain two enormous bat-like wings burst from my back as if unfolding from a thousand year sleep. Without warning I shot up into the air and flew.
With a part of my brain that was beyond thought I flew back home. By the time a thought would form in my head that none of this should be possible I landed in the courtyard of a Manhattan apartment complex before I had the chance to realize that I had even been flying.
I scanned the area and noticed a discarded wall mirror. There I stood; I was 5’2, short even for a woman. My hair was still straight dark brown almost black. My skin, still that soft tan, the color of coffee with lots of cream in it, I was still me but there was something decidedly unfamiliar. I would like to say it was the drying blood on my clothes and flecks of reddish brown spots on my face, but that wasn’t it.
No it wasn’t the fact that I looked fresh from the slaughter. It was the wings the same color as my skin, but larger than any wings I have ever seen. They looked like hairless bat wings; the large thin, yet muscular arms and long crooked fingers descending down the flesh connecting it all so paper-thin I could see the blue veins weaved through it.
That wasn’t the only difference.
I had a tail waving, cordially, at me its movement was so fluid, not like any animal with a tail that I have ever seen, almost swimming through the air. It was thin but had a sense of power to it and topped with a point like an arrowhead. But the most disturbing of all the additions, yes even more than the wings, my toes were fused into hooves all shiny and black under the moon, finally topping it all off the most subtle of the changes the fangs in my mouth. I looked like a medieval painting.
I was a Devil. Yes, a capital D, Devil, at true manifestation of a demon. There I stood a beast, a monster. My ordeal in the jungle had left me changed.
What happened? I can’t think… can’t remember… I sat down and tried to think. But thinking wasn’t a luxury I could afford at the moment. Just then, a menagerie of heartbeats approached me from behind, “Damn!” I had no idea what to do; all I could think was that I needed a way to hide my new preternatural upgrades. Then as quickly as they appeared they disappeared into a thick dense mist that swirled around me with the stray breeze. However, my fangs remained as a sign of what I was…whatever that was.
Once again thanx for reading leave comments if you like i'd love to hear what you guys thing of the story so far. This is about 20% of the book. If you're interested please pick up a copy and tell your friends also Lost: Midnight Mist has its own wikipedia page so check that out and the book can be picked up on amazon.com, target.com, and barnes&nobles.com as well as from my distributor here:
Lost: Midnight Mist by Steven Mellerson (Book) in Horror
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