Witches Under The Willow (Non-Mythos Short)

[Adrian]

I know the places they worship their witches.

I know the cattle they boil their children.

I know the men that wear the horns.

I know the women behind the men behind the women.

I know where I go each eighteenth of the month, yet it is timeless.

But I don't know who I am.

...

It is most haunting, when Autumn arrives there. The soil should be moist and the trees withering away their leaves of gold and red, and the Nature changing her divine greenish clothes to the ones of depressional serenity and decay. It is only natural. It does not happen there. On the hill next to the giant willow. From the trampled ground the cacophonically carnal chant invite up the infernal weed, the thunderous drums summon forward hellish crawlers, and they come from the ground.
Never remembering how I get there, it is not easy to leave. After all, where you're going equals the sense of where you once came, if you don't know where you are in the first place. But still I go. For when dancing a beatless waltz with a fury on the bodies of the buried future, I saw her.
Through the mayhem and whirlwind of demonic beings and women that have born out of the goats their Father has taken as wives, I saw a light darker than the sun, brighter than any aether from a mouth of a rose. She was bright-dark. I saw her eyes, and into it, something fragile yet stronger ... it was something I clearly and instantly saw... that she was lost here... here, but also nowhere...
Then the shouting and the singing and the joined chorus of the soon to be skinned bodies hanging from the trees, that made wonderous sound from their tongueless, mute mouths deafend me, and I lost sight of her in midst the dance of the living death. For a second I had seen her, and then again lost her. But what had I found?
Even those blind torturers from the dungeons of Ab'hamaal could not prepare me for a stroke in the heart by the deviant sort of pain that only gets to you when you let someone in... Into your heart. But had I not seen her just for a moment, here, on the hill where the cries of old men with yet older books yell that 'burning through the witches' reaches not? How does the pain of loss of something never owned hit you so hard that you forget to exhale?
No pins or needles I let that night being pushed through my skin; that former pain of pleasure the eyeless, ever-smiling angels of underworld thrusted upon me. Forsaken became E'hveii, my former favorite, so good at finding my veins... all over my body... and her bite did not feed me or her anymore. What was lost? My memory, but something else, that I had found... and the lost again.
I danced with the horde, and lived and acted as an animal, for I felt pain in my back from a hunters arrow. Wild was the shouting and howling of men and beasts alike on the hill next to the giant willow: wide were the rivers of red and the rivers of tears that we licked right off the faces of the innocent, dangling from the branches, hanging from the bodiless, scaled hands that held them high and were their gallows.
The animal within always played along: I never turned down the strange women that came from the blistering doorway from under the hill, naked and burning with a flame within - eyes as blue as the innocence once lost with a touch as cold as the blood in their veins... The succubus and incubus - me and her - we danced without moving, as she made me shiver, taking me with force and me doing horrid things to her, and she laughed and shrieked alike when cutting her skin and then making things with the wounds that I'd like to forget... only if I could first remember...
How the hell did I get there anyway? When I opened my eyes, I was always walking up the hill, the chant of drums and the murmur of the hound in my ears, calling and warning me... Fear surrounded me, I cannot deny, when walking though that valley that was always full of shadows, and the beasts behind them. A dream of a nightmare or worse, I never tried to guess, so I could not turn back, because I was lost anyway... And I went up the hill, companied only by a scent of a memory what the witches and I did on top of the highest low, in the grave and on the shoulders of Atlas.
Until that aforementioned night of her first appearance, I could not count the times of the visits that chilled the marrow in my bones, but exited me to the point I almost fainted, for seeing the twisting figures and deformities of abnormalities was as walking to some painting of an idiotic genius. All I knew and felt was a path that had been worn into the Autumn grass by my countless, endless visits. Now, against my will, I remembered that I had joined the insane gathering six times, and this was going to be the seventh, counting from her appearance.
The old lady, naked and covered with boils on a skin too pale for ever being alive, took my jacket as always, smirking with a cackling voice, and I stepped into the ring on the hill next to the giant willow, surrounded by weird signs and a trail of salt.
And I danced and I pranced, holding hands with those that were not human, and eating the living with the dead. I had no memory and therefore I could have no future, for I was lost, and the center of nowhere was the hill, where I felt most at home. An illusion, which I was keen on keeping alive. Until she appeared again.
What can I say? I was afraid of her, and the reality she brought. Fear gives men wings, but I was a jet engine. Heart pounding hard enough to get hungry looks from the staggering ghouls that were having intercourse with the bones of the blackest witches, hard enough to make the succubus drool foam from hearing a rhythm of blood, hard enough to fear I would explode... This time I wasn't going to let her go: maybe she knew where I was and why... was I here. It wasn't just as she might have known the answers... I was drawn to her by her... humanity - the dim light in her eyes shimmering back from the surface of a dirty, muddy soul.
Through the bleeding, blossoming rosebushes I waded, over the trembling vines I hopped, crossing the ground stomped soft by hooves, I went towards her... She stood still, her eyes wide open and petrified with fear, as it was clear she was not here intentionally, yet her presence was most noticeable by the incubuses and other women, witches and virgins alike, all wicked to the bone, and lips smeared with something red.
She just stood there, while E'hveii had her way with her, and the screams multiplied her pleasure. Now she turned her deep green eyes to me, and offered 'new flesh' to me and to share. I had been with her before, and others like her, blacking in and out of ecstasy, feeling the blood dripping down the neck, their steaming-hot tongues going up and down my neck... to shiver and to quiver... by fear that she might lose her temper and rip the neck in two... and by the strange, empty pleasure it made me experience...
The look in her eyes... and the look in the eyes of her under the incubus... I... Me, a mere mortal, grabbed the wicked one by her angelic, white hair and tore her off of her, while sending punches and kicks into her face, fighting the beast with the feral man inside, for I suddenly felt disgust... of her and her kindred, of the horned ones and the witches, clad in nakedness, of the dead and the damned, of the Black Man sitting on the branches of the giant willow and playing along his maddening flute...
On the ground that should be dead in Autumn, but for some unnatural spell had become to grow twisted plants and hellish weed - the kind that grows on all the battlefields of the earth, the kind that grows where murder has been committed and blood has been spilled, she sat like a lost child, unable to cry and pale of face for someone had made a good work on her neck. I simply picked her up, and carried her off.
I remember feeling warmth in her, human and good... Remember her scent and the closeness it gave me to the real world... The one I had lost, and now I had found her again.
She wore black - the gound and the shirt, a veil... a bride. But her mind wasn't, for I saw... as the rooster sees the sun rising through the mountains before everyone else is blind and as a newborn knows her mothers heartbeat and feels kindred and close to it. She was still in a state of shock, for could have been too much for her; all the infernal creatures, the sensation of burning flesh, the screaming babies, the goat that walks on it's feet not hooves, the nightmare of reality... Timeless formless mindless endless - in the middle of nowhere, on the hill next to the giant willow.
And she looked into my eyes for a second... and turned away, coughing up blood...
Under the three blood-red moons the trees away from the gathering casting shadows sharp enough to sting, but we sat there in the silence, in strange peace of madness... She wept... And then, after aeons of timeless existence, I cried too... First, warmer than any drop of blood, the burning tear rolled down my cheek as I gazed upon another lost one, for she too didn't know why she was here and how... And I felt the tear so strong, with such force enough to crush a diamond... Angst of being caged to a barbless house, the fear of not knowing where you are, a schizophrenic paranoia inside a megalomaniac about gathering sanity - and I became to remember... And knew I could not wake up marching up the hill never again... for I was going to Hell, back to Hell...
But how could she know it, pure but defiled, virgin but tasted, damned with blessings? Why did she cry while holding me close? Serenity, in the dose that was injected to the mind, novocain for the soul, was only possible to get from another... human... And as she pressed her bleeding neck against mine, I felt 'real' life, and her sacrifice was my offering.
I woke up. But not while marching up the hill.
***
NOTE: The patient currently residing in room 343 has somehow regained consciousness. At 03:48 PM, local time, he was found weeping in his bed. The nurse discovering the once elapsed patient notified the surgeon currently working on the 2nd floor on reason to believe an arterial injury that had been inflicted on the patient.

As the tests have by now showed there was no visible wound of any kind; in fact the blood was showed not to belong to the patient in the room 343 at all. By coincidence, it was later a far-fetched conclusion, that the patient, years in a similar state of mental illness now known as autism, had had any contact with another, female patient across the hall - she too with an autistic behavior disorder. Both now fully cured, show no signs of the former disorders, were let out from their wards, and have now left Bethelem Asylum.

It is has been proven by relatives from both sides that they had never been in contact before in their lives, but in despite of that, patient 343 and patient 441 left the institute together in the same taxi, acting wit each other as being old friends, or even lovers.

Both were under treatment in terms of extensive shock therapy on the eighteenth of every month - once experimental treatment against autism but now banned from use - for their relatives submitted both of them in reason of insanity and developing signs of maniacal depression. Both left in an unknown direction, smiling to each other.

This report is for 'Your Eyes Only' to the assistant director of Bethelem Asylum concerning the strange healing of the two patients and the weird amount of blood found on both of them.

...

...

END NOTE.

[Aleister]

I enjoyed reading that very much..

The mystery and confusion in the character, almost dream-like, leading up to the truth that it was truely a dream, at least in some metaphorical sense. There are lots of interpretations

Want to explain anything about this? Inspiration? The true meaning in your eyes? I would be curious.

[Adrian]

I actually listened Rob Zombie's "Dragula" the whole time I wrote it and got the idea from that. Somehow. I try not to think about what I'm writing when I'm writing. Even I don't know how it's going to end. But when I write I want the line between fantasy and reality to fade. on rare occasions I do pull it off.

[Adrian]

"Let us not mock the insane for their madness lasts longer than ours"

A quote I remembered. Describes the meaning of the story better than any lenghty explanation.

[Aleister]

That works

[decadence]

Well written. I enjoyed this :D

[Adrian]

Those sort of writings were done a year or so ago. Was in that whole gothy mood, from which I am immensly thankful I wriggled out of, and the theme of vampires, sabbaths etc. appealed to me more. Glad to say I think I've passed that stage where dim graveyards, werewolves and vampires seemed scary or horrific.

[Adrian]

Something worth mentioning: sci-fi/horror writers didn't like the story because it wasn't quite in the horror genre and ordinary fiction writers said it was too science-fiction, leaving the genre of the story in limbo.

[Aleister]

Interesting