Night Beetle snapped back into his own body and opened his eyes. He watched the silhouette of a brontosaurus wandering the distant horizon. He unpleasantly remembered a tome which spoke of dinosaurs bearing hundred-foot long tapeworms in their intestines.

  The ba of a necrophiliac skimmed the surface of the marsh, devouring the floating ordure and scum. The tongue of an ichtyosaurus lashed out and snared the ba like a viscid whip, breaking the ba’s wings like a garrote and then biting off its human head.

  Night Beetle closed his eyes again and drifted into another trance, this time tapping into the Pestilante hive-mind, the collective unconscious of his people that hovered somewhere between the physical and spiritual planes like a continent-sized horde of insects. Climbing through the millennia of wisdom passed down from shaman to shaman, sifting through the histories, memories, and archetypes stored like honey in the Pestilante hive-mind, exploring the entire aggregate of Pestilante knowledge, Night Beetle patiently searched for enlightenment in the Akashic records of his people. Two days later, he opened his eyes. The ancient, arcane, forbidden, hideous means of decrucifixion had been revealed.

  Elephantiasis.

  As an entomancer, Night Beetle knew that mosquitoes were the vessels which spread elephantiasis, and began to summon a horde of the infected bloodsuckers. From the glands in his armpits and genitals he released a stream of mosquito pheromones, calling them in their chemical language. The scent radiated through Crucifix Swamp, and was soon answered by a piercing, buzzing cacophony. The surrounding marsh began to vibrate. The buzzing continued to intensify and the swamp began to darken, as though from the unnatural gloaming of a mid-day eclipse of the sun, and then, within the span of a single second, thousands of mosquitoes converged upon Night Beetle and covered every centimeter of his flesh.

  Their siphons plunged into his skin and it seemed as though he were being recrucified, this time with an infinity of nails impaling his every cell to the wood of the cross. The effect was somewhat akin to being trapped between the halves of a new torture device that was part iron maiden and part crucifix, squeezing him to a perforated pulp. The mosquitoes swarmed and drank, draining his blood until Night Beetle feared they would suck every last drop from his veins. As they fattened they began to fly away, back into the swamps, to digest and breed, until finally they had gone almost as suddenly as they had come, except for the few, red-bellied, bloated corpses who had overindulged and were now floating upon the scummy surface of the swamp.

  Night Beetle’s flesh looked as though it had erupted into ant-hills and tiny volcanoes. His entire body was swollen, as though from a grotesque congeries of allergic reactions and puncture wounds. The loss of blood soon led to lapses of consciousness. The enteral device hooked into his flank continued to churn and vibrate and gurgle all the while, and his wounds began to fester in the rancid swampwater that bubbled and dripped like liquid vomit from his mouth.

  He could sense that the changes were already taking effect in his limbs and genitalia. The mosquitoes had repaid him for the blood with gifts of their own, including fevers and somnolence. The most important gift of all, though, the elephantiasis that would free him from the cross, and allow him to flee Venatode and escape Crucifix Swamp, was one that took months to grow. The acceleration of its development was crucial to Night Beetle’s survival, but it was something he could not attain on his own. To escape death at the hands of the tapeworm goddess he would have to seek the benedictions of the Lord of the Flies.

  Night Beetle’s eyes rolled back in his head as he prayed to Beelzebub. His lips mumbled spells, his nostrils dilated, his eyelids fluttered, and with the aid of the fevers he began to slumber, and as he slumbered he began to dream, and as he dreamed he astral projected to the netherworld in which Beelzebub dwelled.

  Through some stelliferous abyss Night Beetle drifted, journeying further from his physical body than any previous trance had ever taken him, flying through the nocturnal skies, encompassed by one continuous night that glittered with starlight not only above him, but around him and beneath him. There was no earth, there was no moon, there was no sun. There was nought but the mite-sized sparks of distant stars. Like a derelict he floated without volition, his soul suffused with nausea and vertigo as he traversed the unfathomable gulfs of space and time, until finally a shadow appeared within the infinite sphere of the horizon, somehow darker than space itself, and Night Beetle knew that he had entered the realm of the Lord of the Flies.

  Like a black star Beelzebub’s palace loomed over the ancient void, larger than anything Night Beetle could have ever imagined, and yet somehow it had existed for what he knew to be eons in utter secrecy from his people, too dark or too far or too incomprehensible to the human brain to ever be discovered or even perceived by the antennae of Pestilante astrologers as it floated through its alien and antipodal zodiacs. It drew Night Beetle’s soul like a lodestone, sucking his very spirit into its depths as though by some hideous form of osmosis, pulling him like undertow through cold labyrinths of shadow and vacuum and death, then depositing his astrosome inside the throne room of the insect god.

  Beelzebub’s million eyes were like mirrors of black glass, each one reflecting a different scene of pestilence, torture, and death from somewhere in the universe. Night Beetle spent an eternity trying to decide if the images were reflections of reality or refractions of Beelzebub’s mind. He could not determine whether the abominable grotesqueries were histories, happenings, or prestidigitations, or glimpses of worlds, planes, and dimensions beyond any human understanding, or the memories, thoughts and dreams of an omniscient demon. Perhaps they were everything he pondered. Perhaps even more. Looking into the eyes of the perfidious god was like gazing into a congeries of oracles and astrolabes, and Night Beetle had the cold feeling that the dark deity could see all the way back to the beginning of the universe, and all the way to the end of time, and all the way to the very edges of space, from heaven to hell and all points in-between, be they physical, astral, spiritual, or otherwise.

  The Lord of the Flies sat upon an ornate throne composed of some black and alien jewel that was veined with a nebulous species of white quartz. He was juggling a planet in his hands in that peculiar manner with which flies often handle strange and abhorrent artifacts. His chamber was filled with hordes of dipteran demons, buzzing incubi and succubi soaring through the fetid air, crawling along the curved walls, and tunneling through giant heaps of offal. The raw flesh of dead gods hung on meathooks with impossibly long chains, dangling from the dome of the ceiling. The bloody slabs of meat were writhing with maggots and dripping glowing ichor onto the floor. Many of them had been perforated with gaping siphon-holes or carved to jagged pieces with a serrated blade. Night Beetle realized with an ague-like chill that the consumption of godflesh made Beelzebub not only a deiphage, but a cannibal as well.

  Night Beetle kneeled down before the throne of Beelzebub, and the Lord of the Flies entered his mind. The Pestilante shaman would remember very little of their communication, only phantasmagoric fragments that lingered like the dreams of a comatose sorceror, images of Beelzebus and his lingering, buzzing, telepathic voice speaking of unholy bargains and abhorrent saviours. As Night Beetle fell back through space and time, he bore with him the strange feeling that he had sold the world for a pittance, and then he slammed back into his physical body with all the force of the infinite miles he had fallen. As he settled back into his flesh, he could already feel the lymph pooling in his limbs and scrotum.

  Night Beetle closed his eyes once again and meditated upon the crucifix for fourteen weeks. The enteral contraption of the Parasitiques kept him alive, continuously pouring the swampwater and all the loathsome but nourishing creatures within it down his throat. When he awakened it was in the light of a full moon, with his head lolling and his eyes pointing directly down at his genitalia. His testicles had swollen to the size of severed heads, his distended scrotum bulging like the satchel of a headhunter who had just slain conjoined twins. Beneath them, his legs had grown turgid, like blood-filled lungs that were about to rupture. His ankles had enlarged to such an unnatural degree that the nails impaling them to the cross had been dislodged, and were now resting at the bottom of the swamp. His arms and hands were nearly as tumescent as his legs, and the nails in his palms were beginning to loosen because of the rapidly-swelling flesh.

  His chest had expanded and torn itself free of the silk and mucus ropes that had tied him to the cross. He was so bloated with lymph that he looked and felt like he might burst apart at any time. His dark skin had grown rugose and scaly, and in certain areas had been completely replaced with a rough, grayish integument. So hideously and permanently disfigured was Night Beetle that he no longer recognized his own body. The elephantiasis which the mosquitoes had borne into his flesh had taken hold in a matter of weeks. The Lord of the Flies had answered his black prayers.

  A swarm of flies hovered next to a tree a short distance from the cross. Each fly had all six of its legs wrapped around a squirming scarab. Night Beetle could feel them watching him, as palpably as if they were crawling across his flesh; could feel their eye contact as tangibly as if one of them had become entangled in his eyelashes, or trapped beneath one of his eyelids, or imprisoned in one of his optic lobes as though it caught in amber.

  In the distance, the last sparks of fleeing will-o’-the-wisps and fireflies disappeared. No animals swam or waded through the bog for miles around. No insects chirped or sang. Every living creature that was able to do so had fled, and the empty trees would have joined them had they the means or the methods of doing so. Nothing remained but the strange horde of flies and their captives, waiting patiently in the humid and viscous air.

  A shaft of sallow moonlight illuminated the swamp. Night Beetle’s colon was undulating like a giant eel. A bubble floated to the surface of the murky waters, followed by a trail of several more. As they began to burst it was as if the marsh had become a vat of boiling sewage. Foul sprays of bogwater fountained through the evening mists. The tapeworm goddess Venatode had come to devour her sacrifice.

  Slowly, from beneath the bubbles, Venatode emerged from the swamp. The parasite goddess bore the visage of a woman, with long, blonde hair the color of jaundice and a face as hard and white as bone. She arose from the fen like a cobra, revealing a set of etiolated shoulders, arms, and breasts. Marshwater drained from her skin as she ascended further. Gradually she elongated to her full height, a twenty-foot tall abomination. She was segmented like a tapeworm, but those segments were human torsoes with bulbous breasts. Some of her nipples were more than a foot long and resembled pale termite mounds. Her skin was a strange shade of alabaster, all at once reminiscent of eggs and scorpions and albinos and virgins and skeletons. Her face was beautiful, yet horned like a demon’s and covered in suctorial organs. Brown and green juices poured from her smiling mandibles, dripped from her vampire fangs, and runneled across the wicked pincers that jutted from both sides of her mouth. Her every fang itself was a tiny maw, ringed all-around with pointed teeth, extending to the back of her throat in rows of three and writhing like worms on barbed wire. Her fingertips bore miniature replicas of her mouth, gnashing and salivating and chewing on the air in anticipation of flesh and blood. They began to sing.

  Night Beetle felt another wrench in his guts. He struggled to free himself from the crucifix, but still could not tear his tumid hands from the chitinous nails. As he writhed in place his abdomen began to distend even further, like that of a pregnant woman. He could see things writhing beneath his skin. Three tapeworms emerged from his mouth and four more from his nostrils and ears. They landed in the swamp with the sound of flesh slapping water, then began swimming and wriggling toward the parasite goddess.

  Night Beetle pulled and felt the rotten wood of the cross start to loosen. He lurched and shook and tried to tear his swollen hands free. The horned head of a tapeworm burst through his navel with a tiny explosion of blood, then squirmed out segment by segment until its entire ten-foot long body was dangling in the bog. It finally detached and began swimming towards Venatode with its brethren.

  Night Beetle was shaking from side to side now, trying to rip each hand free in alternating spasms, jerking first to one side and then to the other. The crucifix was creaking and flaking and pieces of damp wood were starting to fall from the crosspiece. As he lurched to and fro his stomach inflated even more, its skin stretched as tightly as that of a tom-tom. As the mouths in her fingertips continued to sing, Venatode began calling out summoning forth her minions in the eldritch and grotesque language of the helminthes. The flesh over Night Beetle’s stomach began to bubble, first slowly, gradually increasing until it seemed as though it were blistering, and then his intestines unwound, his torso shattered, and in an explosion of blood and offal all manner of tapeworms, hookworms, pinworms, and roundworms rained down upon the waters of Crucifix Swamp. As the parasites were making their gory egress Night Beetle screamed and made one final heave against the cross. The nails ripped through his palms with a sound like papyrus being shredded by the claws of a sphinx. Night Beetle fell face-first into the swamp and floated motionlessly in the ensanguined waters.

  Venatode was wallowing in her sacrificial feast. She draped the tapeworms over her shoulders, caressed them, embraced them. She slurped one of the tapeworms into her mouth, then swallowed an entire fistful. They were a mere prelude to the ultimate sacrifice. When she had finished with them, she would devour Night Beetle’s intestines from his sundered belly.

  Distracted by the live offerings of the Parasitique priests, Venatode gave no attention to the swarm of flies that were rolling Night Beetle onto his back. The Pestilante shaman’s eyes were fluttering, and through them he could see the goddess as she made her grisly repast. The flies were dropping the scarabs into Night Beetle’s open torso. Night Beetle combined his entomantic sorceries with the scarabs’ energies to heal himself, sealing them inside his guts and then knitting his intestines and flesh back together. The scarabs crawled all through his digestive system and unhooked the barbed straw from his innards, so that it could be safely removed.

  As Night Beetle was healing the flies were rearranging themselves, flying in eccentric orbits and mounting one another as if they were mating. After several minutes they had taken on the form of a gigantic caddisfly, with a three-foot long ovipositor. Through this ovipositor a large, black egg slowly descended. It looked uncannily like the planet Beelzebub had been juggling between his forelegs in his accursed throneroom. Night Beetle flashed back to his phantasmagoric encounter with the Lord of the Flies. Beelzebub’s avatar dropped the egg of the eldritch deity into the hole of Night Beetle’s abdomen just before the skin sealed itself shut. The strange entity then ascended straight upwards into the night, with neither the slightest arc nor hint of curvature, as though it were directly bound for the moon and the stars and beyond.

  Night Beetle slowly gathered up his discarded vials and pouches. As Venatode remained oblivious to his revival, consumed by her bingeing, Night Beetle pulled the broken straw up from his digestive system and out of his mouth. Gastric juices hissed as they met the rancid swampwater. He removed the enteral device from his side, then opened a bottle of formic acid, and poured its contents into the chambers of the feeding contraption. Night Beetle raised the device high over his head and charged, breaking it into pieces over Venatode’s head and splattering her with the corrosive beetle-secretions with which he had filled it. The tapeworm goddess screeched, looked up, and lunged in one fluid motion. Just before Venatode buried her fang-mouthed fingertips in his flesh, Night Beetle saw that each one was a living hookworm. A moment later their concentric circles of teeth were tunneling, suckling, masticating, feeding, feasting. Night Beetle pounded Venatode’s hands and wrists with his engorged arms until the hookworm-fingers detached, many leaving their fangs behind, embedded in his wrinkled skin.

  Venatode charged the Pestilante shaman again, goring him with the horns and suctorial organs upon her head, driving him onto his back in the marsh waters and landing heavily atop his deformed body. Night Beetle spied the nails of chitin lying in the swampbed. He reached out with a bulbous arm and placed them in one of his pouches, even as the tapeworm bitch-goddess smothered him against the bottom of the bog. Night Beetle wrestled her like an animal, fought to his feet and, with the newfound strength of his enlarged body, lifted Venatode into the air and rammed her against the crucifix which he had hung from for three months. He let her long body slump down into the swamp until her head was even with the top of the cross, then drove the nails into her uppermost hands. As she thrashed about on the cross and a hundred hookworms plunged their mouths into his skin, Night Beetle pulled a handful of bombs from another one of his pouches.

  Venatode screamed an instant later as Night Beetle tossed one of the bombs at her abdomen and her middle segment exploded, tearing her in two. Her upper half, still nailed to the cross, burst into flames, the tapeworms dangling from her flesh and mouth sizzling and burning to a crisp. Her lower half sank down briefly into the marsh, then floated back to the surface, spasming and bleeding and splashing in the water. Venatode watched her severed body twitch and writhe like a sundered basilisk tail as she burned on the cross, expending its every reflex until finally submerging itself in the filthy waters and descending back into the depths of Crucifix Swamp, leaving a ring of bubbles in its wake, the same bubbles which had augured Venatode’s coming. As Venatode thrashed violently upon the crucifix, her head and the remainder of her body still aflame, Night Beetle lit another bomb and tossed it down her throat as she was shrieking. An instant later the parasite goddess exploded, and the swamp was once again showered with helminthes, tiny comets of burning tapeworms and flaming hookworms and blazing pinworms and sparking roundworms. The shrapnel rained all around, chunks of blackened tapeworm meat and entire organs smoldering like embers. Flaming, severed breasts floated gruesomely through the bog, their tall nipples burning down like candle-wicks. Night Beetle stood, his massive chest heaving, his brain spinning with fever, gazing upon the drifting carnage until, gradually, the burning shrapnel dwindled and disintegrated, the waters grew still, and the creatures of Crucifix Swamp began emerging from their sanctuaries and returning from their exoduses.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11