Manuscript Chapter One

“You… can’t… do… this…”
“Bite.”
“I’ll… sue…” the convict could hardly speak, his breath so spent. The masked guard punched the prisoner, spilling more of the criminal’s blood onto his orange jumpsuit. None landed on the guard’s hard, plastic armor. “Cruel… an’… unusual.” The guard punched the man again, and the prisoner bit down on the rubber rod, pock-marked with the teeth of many men.
“You won’t sue, damned one, because you will be dead,” the Judge said. The prisoner thrashed against the guard. “Hit him again,” and the guard obliged. The prisoner lost some teeth, although they were held in place by the rod. He screamed.
“You are making it harder on yourself. Just die.”
The prisoner screamed, though it was quite muffled by the rubber, and the guard spun him around. “Do it,” the Judge said in his voice, leaning out of the shadow just enough to be seen for the prisoner to see a goddamn college student.
However, the last thing that the prisoner saw, before the hard metal tips of the guard’s thumbs, were the guard’s bright, green eyes, glowing in the holes of his inhuman mask. The guard pressed his thumbs into the prisoners eyes, and, once firmly in the socket, began to pull the man’s head in half. The prisoner screamed as bone tore, then flesh. Mucus strands beaded with blood crisscrossed between the two jagged halves of the skull like bridges from hell. A bone fragment fell, bounced off the guard’s hand, and onto the floor. With a pop, a sickening, ligament-tearing pop, the right side of the ex-convict’s head popped off, his flesh sloughing off as the guard swung his hand out wide. The rest of his body jerked left.
The guard then ripped the inmate’s jumpsuit open, then his bloody undershirt. Using his sharp thumbs, he cut a line in the inmate’s belly, gripped the flap of skin, and ripped the whole sheet of skin off, exposing muscle and ribs.
It was now that the prisoner stopped screaming, although he had been dead for half a minute.
The guard laid down the sheet of skin tenderly, looked back at the exposed innards. He cocked his head, as a child would examining a tree leaf, then slowly, deliberately, inserted his hand between two ribs, grabbed one, gave a sudden yank, popping out most of the ribs. A few more jerks, and they were all gone. He then removed most of the slippery guts, and grasped the spine with both of his hands, tearing the legs off the body. He then looked back up at the Judge, who nodded. The guard dragged the mutilated torso out of the room, the intestines trailing behind him, leaving a bloody trail.
The judge picked up the sheet of skin… and began to write in blood.

Thirty years before, a balding man wakes up in a cold sweat. He died later that day.



The Egyptians or the Greeks, it does not matter which, discovered the Tome, for you can hardly describe such an object as merely a book, millennia ago, in a temple long since defiled, and found it to be too gruesome for even their mythos. Human flesh adorned by teeth and bone, each sheet covered in writing of a strange language- English- on flayed and thinly weaved skin, slimmer than paper. The strange, macabre sketches of emaciated humans being tortured and killed varied the color of red with pale greens and yellows. Every liquid in the book looked fresh, glittering in the least of light, even a thousand years after the finding of the book. Hand and foot bones inlaid on the inside cover depict nothing more than a rough cylinder. One bone disappeared every twenty years or so. After those were gone, the pages started to go blank.

“What do you have there?”
“Nothing, nothing, it’s just a bundle of ancient parchment.”
“Anything on them?”
“No, they’re blank…” and in a history museum, a small bundle of parchment, no matter how old, isn’t that exiting. The museum director left the room. Harrison did not tell him what the parchment was made out of. Or that the people used papyrus in the part of the world the parchment came from.
Of course, Harrison did not tell the director of the blood-red instructions written on the pages.

As a child, I believed if you left your arms or legs hanging over the edge of your bed, something would grab you. As I aged, I learned that nothing would, nothing could. My childhood fears of the dark, the bathroom, blood, even pain all faded away with the realization that nothing lives in the gloom surrounding a bed at night. And I was right. Nothing does live down there. That’s what terrifies me. Because something can reach up from the murk and latch onto your arms.
These nightmares invade my dreams, too. When I can fall asleep, when I see these… flashes at night. Men, brutal, horrible men, dying, screaming, blubbering. Not even cursing nor threatening. Beyond scared. Beyond terrified. These men, who have committed the worst atrocities, have had their sanity methodically dismantled and destroyed by pain and horrors. The destruction of their body isn’t enough. The minds have to be shattered. I see what happens to the pieces of body that are left over. What happens to their broken minds?

Harrison closed his journal. His had filled his personal journal. He started it when he began having these nightmares. When he brought home the bundle of parchment over a year ago. Someone told him, a friend, before he lost all of them, that writing them down would help him with his nightmares.
Of course, it didn’t. Only one thing helped, now. But the price of relief terribly damaged his soul. He knew that. So he only followed the bloody instructions when the nightmares became intolerable.
And tonight he needed Relief. And it came so much easier for him to seek it each time.
He looked at his list, although he already knew what he must find. And, written in blood, there it was… Bones of your Father. That was going to be harder than blood from his mother. His dad was still alive.
Quietly, with his ax, he left for his childhood home for the last time.

He had aged, but was no less young looking. He had grown wise, in a fashion, but in a twisted way. His nightmares now only came when he completed part of the instructions, but he craved them, needed them. He stopped leaving his apartment except to complete another task. But tonight he would finish the final task on the few parchment sheets. He knew not how he would feed the bloody addiction afterword, but he needed his fix tonight.
He placed his father’s bones, cleaved clean of flesh, on the floor, and doused it in his mother’s blood. He spread the ashes of a child across the skull, and a dead, gutted infant in its ribcage. Then, the ancient instructions specifically asked for this, a Darth Vader action figure. Then he turned off the lights.
Harrison reveled in his atrocious nightmares.
And when he woke, someone… thing… else resided in the room with him.
“Little man, I can give you the blood you so desperately seek. First, however, I must feed.”
The ecstasy of pain.