Blood Voices

By Gary L Morton

Witch fire gifted me with blindness and I was cast into a buried demon's darkness. Today I have risen in the smoke and can see. Long ago I entered you and sipped your blood. I sealed your fate. How you lusted, panted; memories of your early desires are hidden in my mind like the many bodies in your basement. Some of them are pieces, others are stumps. Time rots the flesh away and leaves shining bones; it leaves our soul in the power of voodoo, trapped in the reassembled fragments of a skull.

Once we were sociable and kind, but I entered and brought the withering into you and your inner universe. You dreamed of falling and awoke drooling in the belly of a nightmare. You devoured the sweet flesh of the innocent. The night was long, the heart a dry bellows, the hands trembling, the head stabbed by imaginings, the blood magma explosions, and finally the joy of murder … creamy flesh against the black vinyl of a raincoat and blood raining on our blond wig.

You see her trying to choke out a scream and rattle free of the chains. You remember flowers not from a grave; a garden in the churchyard and the cross. It is painful remembering the early days of kindness. They shrivel like the wilting blooms. A wrinkled petal falls from your hand and I'm in you like a rusted metal skeleton. Turning, grinning and scanning with a beast's fiery eyes. Hold your head and moan; I'm many voices whispering your secrets. Rage and strike up the fountains of her blood and leave a memory of her smeared in fingerprints. I'll know another of the secrets you can never forget.

You dress like her and walk like her; it's your own throat you seek. A severed head is rolling in the tunnels of your mind and you're a werewolf fleeing your transformation in the slashing rain. Their faces hang from spelunker's spikes and their hearts are spilled on the stone. I read your future in the entrails; I make you psychic so you can't hide in the dull pain of crushed intestines. We share visions of the dead rotting in tombs and know a cryptic wisdom from the pattern of the bodies. In the name of oracles, graven images and the relics of the damned we descend and pull moldering flesh from the earth … broken bones jutting from torn cloth and my brothers and sisters the grinning skulls. I've been many pleasures and voices for you and now I'm falling dust and death rattles.

A gurgle of blood in the bowels of the impaled tells you I've lied.

It’s Halloween, the jury is assembled and the magic circle will break you. The dead have risen as the dead and we can face them. I've brought moonlight here to the basement and webs of lies are illumined. The glory was never yours. My lies were the power. You know this now as you lift the blade to your throat. The voices of the skeletons are frightened whispers. They tell you that I was never more than one voice - the voice of blood and suicide.

The End