If this is your first time visiting this work-in-progress, please click HERE to migrate back to the first chapter, or HERE for the table of contents (coming soon).
This Offering of Flesh
A Novel
by Dylan Bosworth
Chapter Two
The lights dimmed, and the curtain was raised at the stage. Two stout men in suits, a priest, and a withered old woman sat around a table, and in the center posed a glowing orb.
I went from enticed to bored. I’d seen faux seances before—the city was rife with them. Upon every corner, a shop with some Romani woman wearing rags and fine jewelry promised your future for the coins in your pockets.
I glanced at the woman in the black dress. Curiously, she had moved well beyond her seat and now climbed the steps at the side of the stage. She walked purposefully across the wooden planks, her heels clacking like a gavel with each step, and upon the performers’ parting for her to enter and sit with them, I was once again enthralled.
Silence filled the room as the other patrons and I stared at the scene before us—the woman adding a layer that piqued our interest more than any ordinary medium-conjuring ever could. Slowly, she took her seat, choosing the high-backed ornate chair at the head of the table. When she was sat and settled, the brawny men in their funeral suits clasped shackles to her wrists.
Again, I smiled, as now, I was in new territory. Call me perverse if you will, but there was something about seeing a beautiful woman dressed like the dead now bound before me that made synapses I’d thought long dead fire like engulfing stars.
My heart raced as the lights dimmed and the orb on the table began to pulse.
The priest approached the edge of the stage, peered out at the crowd, and bowed his head. Holding his little holy book tight against his chest, he cleared his throat and said, “Let us pray.”
Wooden chair legs knocked against each other as the pious stood and bowed their little heads.
“Our Father…”
Our father, the other men in the crowd echoed. I did not, for I was transfixed. Stuck in place with my eyes turned ever-inward.
“Who art in heaven—”
When the priest finished his groveling, the other men in the crowd lifted their heads and we waited patiently for whatever was to happen, to happen.
The old woman at the table with her spectacles and leathery folds held her hands palm-up, and everyone grabbed their neighbors' in their own. As their palms touched, the lights blinked out like a blown wick.
For the first time since childhood, a wave of shivers ripped down my spine. The air felt desperately cold despite the sweat pooling at my collar, and in the silence, I heard the unmistakable squeaking of rats. I raised my legs and sat my heels on the edge of my seat; if I were to be bitten by some diseased rodent in the dark tent of a show of freaks, I wouldn’t have even felt the damned teeth.
In the darkness, as the squeaks crept closer, the dim light from the orb on the table exploded with a ghostly radiance, casting swirling shadows over the walls like wraiths dancing in the moonlight. The orb appeared to have smoke, thick and black, swirling within it—what manifestation of modern science, I could not tell.
The faces of the performers were grisly with the underglow, their features in reversed shadow, and all their mouths moved in silent whispers—all except for the woman in her shades of darkness. Tremors shook their hands as they held them locked together, and beads of sweat broke out upon their faces.
The woman—my woman—sat silently, coldly, free of the writhing and perspiration that plagued her partners.
A crack as loud as a rifle firing made me jump, and others in the audience cry out. Light from somewhere else spilled over the room like a tipped glass of milk as the halves of the glass sphere fell away, illuminating the audience seats in an azure glow
Images of my homeland—the fields under a full moon that blotted the stars—burned and coiled in on themselves, leaving black soot along the recesses of my aching skull. From the cracked orb, a violent swarm of flies slithered out like Chinese Lóng dragons and circled the stage in a widening loop, their wings buzzing like hordes of locusts.
I had to look away from the corpse-glow that beamed from the table, and when I did, I wished I hadn’t. A writhing mass of rats and other ungodly things festered over the floor like seabeds of teeming life. Snakes slithered under and over mounds of furry vermin, and glistening, black centipedes tickered their feet along, gliding over the other creatures that sullied the ground.
The men around me shrieked and jumped onto their chairs, and I felt my gorge begin to rise. My throat constricted, and over panicked gulps of air, I realized I could no longer breathe.
Sweat trickled down my back, and I desperately scanned the room for the doorway in which I had entered earlier, not thinking clearly, planning on jumping the chairs between me and the exit like skipping upon wet stones across a flowing river. Only this was not water under me. This was death and disease, sliding and clawing in one worming, festering mass.
There was no door. As I scanned the walls, the back wall, the only wall where it could be, there was nothing but solid brick like we’d been mortored in against our will—forever entombed with this monarch who conjured the crawling things from the depths of whatever pit whence she came.
I panicked. The men around me screamed and stomped the ground, and I couldn’t breathe. I clawed at my own throat, wanted to tear out my eyes; I had to do something. It was her, it had to be her!
The beautiful woman dressed like death—why else was she chained? This couldn’t be part of the show; no, she was evil.
Incarnate.
I had to stop her.
I looked again to the stage, beginning to form a plan to rush her, to bash her skull in until the horror stopped, and we could be let free of this ghastly prison, but what I saw when I looked made my breath catch in my throat.
That swarming tornado of flies funnelled down, down into her throat.
The men around me screamed and their screams were blotted out by the swarming of the flies, like a tempestuous maelstrom of wind sweeping scarringly through the room.
I saw rats, snakes, and other sharp and slithering things maneuvering their way up the coats and pantlegs of the audience members, centipedes and worms—spiders digging their way between their lips; but where I stood on my own chair, the writhing mass of vermin and other evil things only thrashed below me on the ground.
As the last of the flies entered the woman’s mouth, the room quieted, the siren call of the wind extinguishing on dead breath, but the other men still screamed.
They screamed and slapped at themselves until they opened their eyes and saw that the creatures that plagued them were no longer there. The room was empty of corruption. The stage was silent, and the dim lights brightened to reveal the actors sitting painfully in the cold calm that swallowed the fading dread.
The woman, that creature I had planned to kill—to kill to save my life—she thrashed once, then twice against the chains that bound her, clanking off the iron rings.
When she finished, she spoke, and her voice belonged to something else.
“Come forth,” she said. “Allow me to peer into your soul.”
The other audience members quickly looked around the room, taking in the clean floor absent their crawling fears, and, upon looking at each other for only a moment, ran for the exit.
All except for me.
The old woman who sat at the table next to my dangerous beauty in black, she stood and walked to the edge of the stage and offered her hand. She looked me in the eyes, and I saw then that hers were glazed over, only white like the blind, like the dead—yet she peered directly at me, her eyes digging deep into my own.
Again, I succumbed to entrancement. Part of me, yes, wanted to run from the room, but a bigger part of me wanted to see how this trickery had been performed.
I indulged the old woman and climbed the three steps that led to the stage, and I looked out into an empty audience room, not a soul to witness my part in whatever it was I sought.
The old woman led me to the side of the chained beauty, of whom I was so transfixed. I knelt by her side next to the great wooden chair. I could see now that the black chair hadn’t been painted, but that the wood itself was black, and carved deep into the legs, armrests, and high-backing were ornate depictions of coiling snakes. I shuddered at the memory of the things that slithered at my feet only a moment before.
The woman beckoned me forth to lean my ear toward her lips, clanking her chains with each labored movement.
My heart raced and I swallowed, anticipating what? I couldn’t be sure. I envisioned my ear pulling away in her teeth, and she seemed to sense my apprehension.
“Shhhh, shh, shh,” she whispered, cooing to me in her snake-tongue.
Although I tried, I could not protest as she put her lips against my ear and whispered.
Thanks for reading chapter two, and I hope you're enjoying the serial so far. Look forward to chapter three, possibly as early as Monday, May 5th.
I'm not some pretentious anoos who is going to claim some on-the-whim serial is without flaw, so feel free to leave your thoughts. With that, I don't take feedback or advice from just anybody, soooo, I was considering opening a chat thread specifically for workshopping chapters. This can just be myself giving my own thoughts and updating changes with the web-novel, but I invite other people to join, too since I want this thing to be the best it can be. Sort of like a Beta-reading-chat thread?
Look out for that, too!