To the Dark Castle

Darkangel ran past the village and into the small clump of woodland that sat isolated on a small hill, a short distance from the main part of the dark forest. He ran because some of his serfs had been killed.

He pulled up and wanted to spew.

The bodies lay in a small hollow near the base of the hill. The ground was nearly knee-deep with leaves. Nobody rakes in the woods. The recent drought had dried the leaves to a fine, biting crunch underfoot. Naked trees and bushes ringed the hollow with branches like thin brown whips. When the leaves came out, the hollow would be hidden on all sides.

The body nearest to Darkangel was a blond man with hair cut so short it looked like an old-fashioned butch. Blood had pooled around the eyeballs, flowing from them down the face. There was something wrong with the face, besides the eyes, but he couldn’t quite figure it out. He knelt in the dry leaves, not caring about the blood that soaked into his clothes. He had been bloodied before. It was nothing new. Blood had pooled to either side of the first victims face soaking into the leaves and drying to a tacky maroon substance.

Touching the tip of his leather gloved fingers to the blonds chin, the skin moved in a boneless, wiggling movement that it was not supposed to do.

He swallowed hard and tried to take shallow breaths. He was glad it was till spring. If the bodies had been sitting this long in full summer heat, they’d have been ripe in more ways than one. Cool weather was a blessing.

Under the chin, nearly lost in the blood on the neck, was a puncture mark. A puncture mark wider than his outspread hand. He’d seen knife wounds and claw marks that could make a similar wound, but it was too big for a knife and what the hell had a claw THAT big? It looked like some sort of blade (a sword perhaps?) had been shoved up under the chin, close enough to the front of the face to slice up the eyes from the inside. That was why they were bleeding but still looked intact. The sword had nearly pulled the man’s face off.

He ran his gloved fingers up to the top of the skull where he found what he was looking for. The exit wound for the sword was at the to of the head. The blade had been withdrawn from the victim, allowing them to fall to the ground. Dead, he hoped, but dying he was sure of.

His legs were missing just below the hip joint. There was almost no blood down there where the legs had been bisected. They’d been cut off after he died? Small blessing, that. He’d died relatively quickly and had not been tortured. There were worse ways to die. He should know, MonsterBeneathTheBed had invented a few.

He moved down to examine the stubs of the legs. The left bone had been cut cleanly. The right bone had splintered. The sword had struck from the left, but only got a piece of the right. A second blow had been needed to finish the job.

Why take the legs? A trophy? Maybe. Serial killers took trophies, clothing, personal items, and the occasional body part.

The other two victims were shorter. They were both male as well. They had dark hair and appeared slender.

One lay on his back almost opposite from the blond. One brown eye staring up at the sky, glassy and immobile, somehow unreal like the eyes of a taxidermy animal. The rest of his face was sliced in two huge gaping furrows, as if the tip of the sword had been coming and going like a backhand slap. A third slice had taken out his neck; severing the jugular and making the victim die of blood loss in a matter of less than a minute.

The third victim was so cut up, that even after all the horrors Darkangel had seen, his eyes did not want to make sense of what he saw. Where the face should have been was just a ripped hole. The attacker had done to this one what he had done to the blond. But this wound was more through. The entire front of the skull had been ripped away, leaving the back of the skull like some horrible cup filled with blood and gore. Blood and gore? The brain was gone!

The chest and stomach had been sliced open as well, leaving the stench of torn intestines hanging in the air, mixed with the coppery sweet scent of blood.

What could have done this?

There were dangerous demons that inhabited the dark forest. None of his serfs dared go in there, especially after dark. Had a demon come out to take them?

Now that was a horrible thought!

He rose from the ground and looked over at his first knight, Strangebutfierce. Even his most hardened warrior looked a little pale.

Darkangel cleared his throat to try to remove the taste of blood that seemed to have collected there from the tainted air. “We need to have a meeting about this,” he said

Strangebutfierce nodded solemnly before falling in behind his king, leaving the mess to be tidied up by the peasants.

In part 2 > Coming Soon >

Darkangel discusses the situation with other members of the castle, only to find that while they were talking, another death has occured.