NIGHTTIME 1894 - SAINT DENIS, LEMOYNE
The collective blast of a firing line impacted his ears like thunder splitting the sky. The head of the killer snapped back, and as if in slow motion, Galen watched his body bend in half and fall to the wet grass with a quiet thud. Blackwood was dead.
Mouths moved and the doctor had the inkling he was asked to verify death over the ringing in his ears. Dazed-like, he drifted over to the bloodied body and reached down. With his fingers pressed against his still-warm neck, he felt for that fluttering proof of life. Nothing. He didn't need to search for a pulse to know it though, as Kane had seen the slack face and hollow-eyes of the dead so many times before. It was something he just knew.
"Dead," he said, confirming it. "He is dead."
Dr. Kane climbed back to his feet and faced the lawmen who had executed the man. Their faces told the story, each with their own perspective. But they continued to stare at the doctor, as if waiting for his answer.
"I said, he's dead." But their faces did not change. "Can you hear me?" Kane took a step closer to them and their faces twisted to fear. They recoiled. "Hello?"
The ringing in his ears grew louder. He felt like he was drowning. Choking. Choking on blood, on rotten earth. He heard gasping and croaking as he gripped his throat. He saw their eyes looking through him and he turned around to face the subject of their terror: Blackwood's corpse, pale and vermiculated, half exhumed from his grave, pale eyes wide upon the storm clouds that gathered above, as all manner of vermin crawled forth from his gaping, screaming mouth.
The doctor, too, should have screamed, but he found himself transfixed in horror, frozen in the cold grip of the scene before him. "He is DEAD!" He tried to utter, to affirm his own facts and ground himself in the known and reasonable, but still the corpse writhed as inch by inch he pulled himself free. And as his empty pearlescent eyes met Galen's, the rasping words of the damned rolled off his rotten tongue.
“You think you know death? I will show you!”
My eyes shot open and I gasped for breath. My pillow was cold against my face, soaked through with sweat. My heart pounded in my chest like a wild bird gone mad in its cage. Sleep would not find me again tonight.
I threw my legs over the side of the bed and sat in the dim apartment room for a moment as the sensations of my nightmare faded into memory. My first thought was of the relief I'd gain by sliding into the caress of my old chemical companion. With cocaine unavailable, all I had was the morphine. Fuck it.
I crossed the room to the writing desk and lit my oil lamp. Inside the drawer I found a clean syringe, which I used to draw up an appropriate amount of morphine from my personal stash. Don't think. Just do. I told myself, to absolve myself of guilt, for I would give myself no time to ruminate on the consequences of my choices. I exhaled as chemical ecstasy cleared my thoughts of worry. The sky was relatively clear tonight, I could see so outside my window, and while it was the middle of the night and the city was asleep, a stroll through amber-lit streets called me to don my shoes and coat and step outside.
The nighttime air cooled the perspiration on my brow and dried my dampened hair. I wandered up and down the streets I knew so well until I'd wandered into an alley that I realized was unfamiliar to me. Something unsettled me about it as it seemed somehow colder than the rest. Instinctively, my hand went to my waistband to retrieve my gun, but found none there, as of course I had left them behind. My conscious mind ordered me to turn around and go back the way I'd come, but some quiet curious part of my mind ushered my feet onward, one after another, until I had been utterly swallowed up by that narrow space between the edifices.
What power called to me, I do not know, but I was like a snake to a charmer -- enthralled and afraid and unable to deny it.
"Hello?" I called into the dark and I realized I could not see as far ahead of me as I once had. The once clear night had become heavy with thick mist, and still I plunged onward into it, the world wobbling chaotically. "Hello? Can you hear me?" I asked as if expecting an answer, as if expecting someone to be there. I passed a brick archway and stepped into what must have been a courtyard, for I heard the rustle of tropical plants and the faint echo of dripping water off closed-in walls, though the sound was strange and far away.
"Hello--" my voice caught in my throat, my body seized. I found myself gripped from behind and a sharp pain across my throat and I felt myself fading into darkness as the world spun wildly around me.
The visage that had appeared from the darkness was terrible and otherworldly. Its wormy grey skin clung tightly to its sunken features. Its eyes were deep and black, and I would nearly say they were missing from their sockets all-together were it not for the glint of moonlight that caught their glassy surface and reflected back to me in milky phosphorescence.
He is DEAD! I screamed internally, for I had seen a corpse so many times, it was just something I knew, but this attempted utterance did not ground me in the known or the factual. My mind was swimming in the gulf of the impossible and unnatural. And as I writhed and twisted to pull myself free, his empty pearlescent eyes met mine, his lips parted, and the scent of the grave rolled off his rotten tongue. His sharpened teeth were plain even in the inky darkness that consumed me as his jaws cracked open wide: it was the face of Baron Von Bruegal, long since dead and yet alive in thought. I cried out at my assailant, but my voice was drowned out by the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears.
And then all there was, was darkness.