Seed of Horror – The Series

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Chapter One



Mist filled the air in twisting fumes while catching the light of the moon like vaporized mercury, thickening the air of this frigid evening. With each step the man took, twigs snapped and autumn leaves crunched beneath his feet, making it exceptionally difficult to keep his footing in the dark forest. Further hindering him were the weights of the can of kerosene hanging in his grip and the tarp-wrapped body he was dragging behind him. The alcohol in his blood and the tears streaming down his face took away what little balance he had left.

Through miles of dense forest and eons of strenuous hiking, he found his way to the spot he had picked several hours earlier. Digging this grave had been like pulling teeth, with the roots of the trees knitted together like sheets of Kevlar, but he had made sure to dig a least a meter down, so as to make sure that this abomination would remain hidden forever. At least he had the daylight back then. He had to rely on the moonlight to return to this place, as he was too afraid of being discovered to carry a flashlight or lantern. His only relief came from the pure radiance shining down from the crescent pearl in the sky, slipping through the barren branches of the trees that stood around him like grotesque skeletons.

Even though it let him see, the light played tricks on his eyes. Every surface was covered in a mosaic of lunar beams from the spindly branches above, turning depth perception into a visual quagmire. Shaking aside his doubt and fear, the man grabbed the rolled up corpse and dropped it into the shallow grave, hoping that this nightmare would finally end. This had been a mistake; it was all a terrible mistake that should have never happened. But here he was, burying the definition of terror and with more blood on his hands than he ever thought possible, blood that would never wash away.

As the corpse hit the cold ground like an elevator with broken cables, the cries of birds began to sound out, cries of fear and anger. Looking around wildly, the man found himself surrounded by a ring of crows, scattered throughout the forest floor with many of them in the branches above. He had not sensed them when he arrived, and they had never even made a peep at his arrival.

Or… could it been that they had been screaming all this time, and he had been too disoriented to hear them?

The scavengers’ beaks glistened with blood, blood from the carcasses of several animals strewn about. Wait… they hadn’t been there before. Rodents, deer, and even a bear were slumped over in the surrounding woods, all in the process of being stripped when the man interrupted the winged scavengers. This pit had only been dug twelve hours ago, yet so many animals lay dead with no reason or logic in their falling. This was now a place of Death, poisoned by the man because he had picked it to bear the curse he was trying to hide. Just by coming to that spot with the intention of defiance, he had invoked the wrath of the horror whispering in his ear.

The crows continued to cry out and screech, wordlessly cursing the intruder and the evil he brought with him. Their kind had always been considered ominous and associated with death and despair, but outside of the library, they were natural creatures, each of them horrified by the abomination brought to their presence. This scene of death and bloody feasting was now darkened with the arrival of the tarp-wrapped corpse. Even with dozens of crows screaming at him like murder victims, the man hefted the can of kerosene and removed the cap. He would burn the body while using the pit to keep the flames contained and hidden, and then bury any remains of this crime against nature. He emptied the can onto the wrapped corpse, yet this only increased the screaming of the crows. Their cries were so high in volume that the man’s ears ached within his skull and he wanted desperately to cover them.

Reaching into his pocket, he drew a book of matches. “Go to Hell,” he muttered, lighting the matchbook and dropping it into the pit.

With explosive force, the kerosene was ignited and the grave turned into a miniature volcano. The crows continued to scream in terror and warning while the man stared into the inferno, unable to see through the mantle of flames. Quickly their cries stepped on his last nerve and he sought to scare them off. Picking up a stick to hurl in the direction of a nearby cluster, he stopped.

Silence.

Every crow had simultaneously been muzzled with fear, utterly petrified. The forest was now so quiet that only the beating the man’s heart in his ears confirmed he still had the ability to hear. Sweating so profusely that he was now steaming in the chilly night, and with shivers crawling up his spine with such intensity that they riddled his limbs with muscle spasms, the man slowly turned and looked down. The flames had withered, having run out of fuel after consuming the tarp. With the plastic sheeting incinerated, the body was fully revealed, lacking a single spec of soot and showing no signs of even the slightest burning. The flames had been powerless against it; they could not stand against the darkness within that flesh and blood vessel. Looking at it and again realizing what he had done, the man struggled not to vomit.

The cheeks, nose, and eyelids of the face had been removed, with the jaws sewn shut and somehow fixed in a permanent grin. The entire body was shaved bare and had been inscribed with hundreds of symbols in a language no human being could read. The symbols had been carved into the flesh itself and then cauterized to prevent the victim from bleeding to death. Lengths of barbed wire had been threaded through the limbs and torso like worms through an apple and then wrapped around the body similarly to mummification, each one having been placed to avoid the organs and vital blood vessels, while inflicting endless pain onto the victim. The fingers and toes were all broken and with the nails torn off. All signs of a gender had been removed: the genitalia region completely destroyed, the pectoral muscles severed, and the throat cut as if to destroy the Adam’s apple, though the man couldn’t remember what the gender of his victim had been.

The slitting of the throat had been done at the end, but it was what had come right after that had killed this… person. Two thick nails of black iron pierced the eyes. They were what killed the victim, completing the ritual the man had been forced to perform and turning this human into a genderless Homunculus, a symbol of mankind while completely devoid of humanity.

Even with the eyes skewered, the corpse stared at the man, at its creator. Slowly, the twist knot in the corner of the mouth that held the stitches tight rotated, coming undone. With each turn of the ends of the wire, the man felt his body drop further in temperature, as if his blood was turning into a frozen slurry. At last, the twist-tie fully split, and even with the wire stitches held taught through the mouth, the jaws slowly began to open. As if friction no longer existed, the stitches completely slackened and the jaw hung open, making it look like the corpse was laughing.

Whether it was real or in his mind, the man did not know, but a whistle as sharp as a razorblade cut through the air and brought him to his knees. His vision flashed with crimson brightness as if the forest was now draped in red Christmas lights, while the symbols he had written on the corpse played in his mind over and over again like a slideshow. Around him, the crows were all falling dead while screaming in agony, unable to stand against the malice now assailing them.

“No! I won’t listen to you anymore!” the man shouted, covering his ears while digging his fingernails into the sides of his scalp.

Freeing one hand, the man tried to pull a layer of dirt over the dead body with a swing of his arm. While the mini rockslide poured over the corpse, not a single grain fell on the face. From his act of defiance, the screaming in his ears only increased in volume, while the bloody symbols in his mind flashed with greater intensity and speed. He could no longer see, the bright red incantations occupied his whole mind and seemed to smash down upon his consciousness with each flash.

He could feel them delving deep into his mind, poisoning every bright light he held dear and driving him mad. In every corner of his mind, his most cherished dreams became twisted nightmares. Friends and family in his memories transformed into grotesque creatures, were ripped apart while screaming in agony in front of Christmas trees, tortured and raped behind birthday cakes, and even went wild and began slaughtering each other on top of Thanksgiving feasts made of human flesh.

Paired with this psychological horror show, waves of physical pain swept through the man, pain so intense that he did not have the strength to scream. Swarms of gnawing fire ants were pouring across his skin like boiling water, bony spiders were sinking their fangs into his organs and making them melt, centipedes were carving openings into his flesh and burrowing into his body, his bones were breaking apart into splinters and tearing apart the surrounding muscles, and his fingernails were being pealed off. He slapped his body desperately, trying to kill the illusionary vermin that his mind projected.

“Ok! I’ll do it!” the man finally shouted.

The pain receded to a dull throbbing, and with just enough strength for a single act of defiance against the whistle, the man ripped his keys from his coat pocket and stabbed himself in the jugular with all his strength. He pulled the keys away, releasing a fountain of gore into the forest. Sprayed into the frigid night air, the hot blood steamed and shined like rubies as it caught the moonlight, before at last splashing down onto the corpse.

The man fell over, the life pouring from his body drop by drop. His death meant nothing; he had not stopped the spread of the evil.



“No one should have to get up this early. This is just barbaric,” Jason cursed as he got out of bed.

Nineteen years old, Jason was in his second year of college, though he lived at home and commuted each day. With September ending, his room had reached that bitter chill that made him question the effort of getting up and putting on clothes when his bed was just so comfy. Knowing that his alarm would never let him stay asleep, he stood up and put on the least-dirty clothes on his floor. Leaving his room, he passed by his younger sister Colleen in the bathroom. A senior in high school, she had auburn hair while his was a more dull brown. She got up before anyone else in the house simply to put on her makeup and get her hair perfect.

As per his routine, Jason wished and cursed that he had been able to find classes that started later while he stepped down the cold stairs and made his way to the kitchen. Always keeping his eyes pealed for omens to signal a good or bad day, he filled up a bowl of cereal and began his morning routine.



With the raisin bran from breakfast sitting in his stomach with weight that would last until lunch, Jason rubbed the steering wheel of his car to try and heat it up while waiting for his girlfriend. He and Christi were high school sweethearts, dating for years and now both going to the Southern Maine Community College to save money before transferring to the nearby university. Parked in front of her suburban house, he perked up like a cat hearing the sound of a can’s unsealing as the front door opened and slammed shut.

Wearing a sweatshirt that would be discarded in just a couple hours and a tight skirt, the blonde beauty rushed out of her house with a travel mug in her hand and her backpack over her shoulder. As she approached, Jason’s pants became tight from his bulging erection in anticipation of her arrival.

“Hey baby,” she said, climbing into his car and giving him a toothpaste and coffee-flavored kiss.

“Morning,” he hummed, looking in the rearview mirror before backing out of Christi’s driveway.

As soon as her house was out of view, he turned to her. “Well?” he asked with an excited smirk.

In reply, she held up a finger to tell him to be patient while she emptied her travel mug. Drinking every last drop of hot coffee, she then washed it out with a mouthful of water from a bottle in her bag. “I swear you have absolutely no patience,” she muttered.

Putting the bottle and mug away, she turned to him and unzipped his pants. Jason’s car swerved from side to side as he tried to stay focused, all the while her cold fingers opened his pants, reached into his underwear, and wrapped around his now fully-erect manhood. Pulling it free of its cloth prison, she embraced it with her mouth. A shudder of euphoria ran through Jason’s whole body the moment her lips touched the head, before proceeding to move down and take the whole thing.

“Well with how well you do it, of course I may be a little over-eager,” he shrugged while her blonde head started bobbing up and down like a buoy in the rough sea.

This was a deal they had made, though in a sense, much of the deal was never spoken. Every day that Christi carpooled with Jason, she would give him a hummer for the road as a way of expressing her appreciation. As long as she sucked him off the three days a week they had classes, her car would be spared the millage and gas consumption of an hour’s commute. But for the record, half of that hour was time spent waiting in traffic, maneuvering through the city of Portland, and trying to find a single motherfucking parking spot. This was a small price to pay, especially since she already blew him during sex. Yet they both knew in the back of their minds that if they got into a fight, Jason could call her a whore for it and completely gain the upper hand.

For ten minutes, Christi slathered his cock with the concoction of her saliva and his pre-cum, then slurped it off with the suction of a vacuum cleaner or licked it off with long sweeps of her soft tongue. The whole time he was driving, Jason struggled to keep the car from swerving as shudder after shudder shook him to his core. Just the feeling of Christi’s spit running down his balls nearly sent him into a stroke. At last, his self-control finally broke and a geyser of foamy semen sprayed into Christi’s throat, making her cough and jerk her head back.

“Sorry.”

“You really need to work on warning me. That is not the kind of thing I need so early in the morning,” she replied while wiping her lips and drawing her water bottle.

“So what do you want to do on Friday? I’m open for anything.”

Before answering, Christi took a long drink of water and even gargled to remove the sticky cum from her throat. “Meh, let’s just order a pizza and watch a movie. I can feel the bug that’s going around inching into my body and I want to try and beat it with laziness.”

Good looking, kinky, lazy, and sweet as sugar. That’s what made her so perfect.

“That sounds good to me. I swear, this semester is kicking my ass. I really need to get my shit together.”

“Ugh, that makes two of us. I’m either at work or school all the time and it’s killing me. I’m too much of a sloth for the real world.”

“Let’s just hope that today ends quickly.”



Swears bounced back and forth in Jason’s car as the young couple struggled to find a parking spot in the stuffed campus. No matter how early you arrived, all of the good spots were always taken and you would have to park at the very edge of the universe, that is, if you could even find a place to park. They had made good time getting to the university, having twenty minutes before their classes started. However, the only spot they could find was in the farthest corner of the campus, behind the local bookstore with a dumpster a few cars away.

“Alright, see you at noon for lunch,” Christi said with a stretch.

“Not so fast…” Jason hummed while looking around.

The expression on Christi’s face immediately shifted, so clearly portraying her inner thoughts that she might as well have had “you have got to be fucking kidding me” written on her forehead. Ok, so she wasn’t always so sweet in the early morning.

“No.”

“Come on, no one’s around and—”

“No.”

“We have plenty of time, plus—”

“No.”

“You’re wearing a skirt. Not to mention—”

“No.”

“It would really help wake me up and—”

“Damn it, Jason! What part of NO do you not understand?! We are not having a quickie in the school parking lot!”

“No one will see us! There aren’t any spots nearby for people to park in, I can’t imagine a reason why someone from the book store would come out to the dumpster, and everyone else has already left their cars.”

“What if someone walks by? What if they see us and decide to snap a picture?!”

“They won’t even know who we are! Seriously, how many people do you know at this university? I don’t have a single classmate listed as a facebook friend. What would someone possibly say? ‘Some couple I’ve never seen before and will never recognize were getting it on without any visible nudity in a car so common that I can’t even remember what color it was’? And besides, if you ride on top, you can keep watch.”

“If I ride on top, I can keep watch. Yeah, great way to ask!”

“Please, just five minutes! I love you! I love you! You’re the best girlfriend ever!”

In reply, Christi released a deep throaty sigh, the kind of sigh that voiced unparalleled disgust and annoyance, but also of giving in. “Fine, but if you don’t make me cum or I end up late for class, you can forget about getting any more morning hummers!”

“Challenge accepted!” Jason countered before throwing himself forward and kissing her.

Resigning herself to the act and coercing her mind into getting into the mood, Christi leaned her seat back while continuing to make out with Jason. Short on time, Jason’s hand passed right over her breasts and burrowed under the waist of her skirt. Slipping into her panties, he began tickling the lips of Christi’s slit, soaking them almost immediately in contrast to Christi’s refusal only seconds ago. With their tongues swirling and dancing, Jason moved his fingers faster and faster until his hand was almost a blur. While he used his thumb to play with her clit like the joystick of a game controller, he used his index and pinky fingers to stroke the interior, and his ring and middle fingers to delve deep into her sopping wet interior over and over with frantic speed.

In just a couple minutes, Christi was fully aroused and ripped off her sweatshirt. Now it was her turn to start moving. While Jason reclined his seat back and hefted his again erect cock, Christi pulled off her wet panties and climbed onto his lap. Facing him with her skirt hiding their nudity, she settled herself onto his manhood and gasped as she felt him fully enter her without any difficulty. Holding onto the shoulders of Jason’s seat, she started grinding back and forth on his cock and panting like a dog as it stirred her pussy like a spoon in cookie dough.

Jason just lied back with a content smirk on his face, watching as she rode him like a mechanical bull. Wanting to take it further, he pulled up her skirt to reveal her round jiggling ass, as pale as vanilla but just glorious in its size and shape. Grabbing her ass cheeks, he squeezed them hard to savor the feeling of her soft naked flesh in his hands. With her blushing face showing her skyrocketing arousal, he even dared a few playful smacks to her rear end.

Soon, just shifting back and forth lost its satisfaction and Christi had to advance. With the windows all fogged up, she began raising herself up to the point of nearly letting Jason’s cock slip out of her, then slamming herself back down so that her bare ass clapped against his lap and his manhood struck the entrance to her womb. Her panting had now evolved into soft yet shrill moans, and as she bounced on his member, he helped by lifting her up with her arms, using her perfect ass as a handle. Yet no matter how engorged with lust she became, Christi never stopped looking around, scanning the surrounding area for anyone who could see them or already be watching them. The fogging windows made good cover, but they were also a dead giveaway. Plus there was the rocking car…

Pushing his luck, Jason moved his right hand onto the middle of her ass and pressed down on the ring of her anus with his middle finger. He was just about to push the first joint in, but Christi smacked his hand away. “I told you no ass stuff!”

“Sorry, I got carried away,” he said guiltily, hoping he had not killed the mood. Fate was on his side, as Christi was too close to climaxing to stop now, and Jason was about to launch his second load.

“Christi… I think… I’m going… to—” he grunted, only for Christi to cut him off with a yelp of fear.

Lying down on top of him, she confirmed the presence of someone outside. It seemed that one of the employees from the bookstore had come out to smoke. The employee was on the other side of the nearby dumpster with a cigarette in hand and the ear buds of his iphone pumping music into his head. They were well out of his peripheral vision and his music would probably drown out the sound of any creaking of the car, but if Christi sat up, he would be able to see her if he looked in their direction, and if she moaned, she would likely be heard.

But while the fear of discovery had pushed back Jason’s bubbling orgasm, it had not removed it. If he didn’t fire it soon at full blast, he would be steadily leaking semen for the rest of the morning. He had to empty it all into Christi or stuff tissues into his underwear to keep from creaming his pants every time he stood up. Aware of the thin ice he was on, he moved his hands to her thighs and lifted her up.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

“It’s too late for me to stop now and I still haven’t gotten you off,” he replied before suddenly bucking his hips and forcing himself back into her.

“Ah! Cut it out, you jackass! He’ll hear!”

“Not it you’re quiet. I just need to finish.”

Ignoring her response, he continued bucking his hips and forcing his cock up into her pussy. Cursing him with a mix of “you idiot”, “we’ll get caught”, “stop it”, and eventually “oh god, keeping going”, she bit down on his collar to contain her moans and even began bouncing her lower body on his lap. She made sure her body was kept low enough to not be seen, but as her falls and his rises dropped out of sync, her peachy ass would bounce up into the view of the outside world. In the corner of his eye, Jason looked to the clock of his sedan. They had just ten minutes to get to their classes, and Christi still had not climaxed. This called for drastic measures.

Knowing this could blow up in his face, he put his hand back on the middle of her ass and pressed down on her anus. Before she could stop him, she forced his middle finger deep into her ass, feeling the hot tender flesh of her rectum. Immediately, Christi gave a gagged cry of both unfamiliar pain and undeniable sexual pleasure. She had never done any ass play, even when she was alone, so this was a completely alien experience and even a bit painful, but she also found herself hornier than ever in her life, confronted with both the possibility of getting caught and having her ass fingered.

Moving the digit in and out of her like he was digging a hole, he fingered her asshole while using it as a hold to lift her up higher and give him more room to maneuver. Continuing to force his cock up into her pussy while fingering her ass, Jason struggled to think of a way that this could get any better.

“Ah! I’m cumming!” Christi hissed, stuffing her mouth with Jason’s collar to keep from being heard.

The sudden tightening around Jason’s cock and finger confirmed her announcement as she experienced a thunderous climax, one so powerful that she could barely contain her scream of ecstasy. Feeling his own body reaching the breaking point, Jason put all of his strength into fingering her asshole and pumping her hot cunt as if his cock were the head of a jackhammer. Just as he was about to cum, her waist completely dropped down onto his and she became limp, with Jason emptying jet after jet of semen into her dripping wet snatch.

Jason’s finger was pushed out of Christi’s asshole and she slowly moved over back to the passenger seat with foamy cum running down her thigh.

“God, you are such as asshole. I can’t believe you did that,” she muttered, grabbing a handful of tissues from her bag and cleaning herself off.

“Oh come on, it’s always good to try new things. And besides, you know you like it,” he replied, teasingly sucking his finger clean.

“That’s not the point. I told you not to and you just—oh forget it,” she groaned, angrily pulling her panties back on and storming out of his car with her stuff.
“Damn it,” Jason cursed, knowing that he had gone too far this time.



Jason’s head swung lazily like a tetherball in the breeze, with his eyes feeling like they were as dry as attic dust and holding up the steel shutters that were his eyelids. ‘Ugh, why did I think this would wake me up? I’m even more tired than usual,’ he thought to himself while the history teacher recanted information on the Indus Valley.

World History to 1500, he couldn’t believe his luck when he saw it on the add/drop list. However, the only class he could find was at 9 in the goddamn morning. With an hour to drive to school and his morning routine being far from rapid, he got up at the same time as he did every morning back in high school. He had tried coffee and even 5 Hour Energy, but nothing worked the way he wanted it to.

By all accounts, the history teacher was pretty good at his job. Professor Nelson was a man who appeared to be caught within several ages at once. His hair was bright gray, but in contrast to his unwrinkled face, it was as if his hair had suddenly changed color from stress of some kind. His personality was of someone who had just given up on life… no, like someone who had been beaten by life. He was never mean nor happy, enthusiastic nor uncaring, slow nor energetic. The only problem was that he reeked of menthols.

“Mr. Stevens, if you’re going to sleep in my class, at least do so in the back of the room where I don’t have to see you,” the professor sighed, causing Jason to bolt awake after deciding to put his head down for a minute.

“Sorry, late night.”



The rest of the day passed with similar exhaustion, and Jason eventually found himself eating lunch alone. It seemed that it would take time for Christi to forgive him, if she did forgive him at least. Her anger was evident, when instead of riding with Jason back home, she took the bus to her dad’s office in the city to get a ride with him. He would have to make things right with her tomorrow or the relationship would be over.



Getting out of his car with a stretch, Jason groaned in happiness to be back home. He didn’t live in the suburbs like Christi; the surrounding land was much more rural, but the houses were close enough together for everyone to know each other. As he retrieved his backpack, he glanced over to his next-door neighbor’s house. Tim Jones lived alone, having lost his wife to cancer a few years back. After his daughter left Maine to attend Harvard University, he hit the bottle hard in his loneliness and Jason’s parents had decided to sever their ties with him due to his ensuing behavior. There was a time when Tim and the Stevens family had been on good terms with each other. Jason had even gone out with Tim’s daughter once, but Jason’s parents had warned him and his sister to stay away from the neighbor now that he seemed drunk 24/7.

But for almost a week, Tim’s driveway had been vacant, his gray pick-up truck nowhere to be seen. Never in the morning, evening, or afternoon had Jason heard it swerve and thunder up Tim’s driveway, and Tim had completely disappeared from sight. With the pile of newspapers and bills overflowing from his mailbox and stacked up by his door, it seemed that Tim really was gone. Come to think of it, Jason did recall hearing a lot of one-sided yelling in the house before Tim’s disappearance. Had he just driven off and abandoned his home? No, no matter how depressed he was, his daughter still came and visited for the holidays, so he would never just run off and leave it behind.

CRASH!

Making Jason momentarily tense up and crouch, a bird swooped down and slammed into the bay window by the front door, smashing through one of the small panes. Jason stood still, wondering if he should do anything. A living bird would wreck havoc in the house and a dead one would stink it up. Plus a broken window was just begging for someone to sneak in and rob the place. On the off-chance Tim was going to come back, it wouldn’t hurt Jason to at least cover the hole with the plywood. Besides, after what he did to Christi, he needed some good karma.

Taking a hammer, nails, and sheet of plywood from his basement, Jason walked through the river of tall grass and onto Tim’s property. Looking through the window, he could see the lifeless bird sprawled out on the living room carpet. It had to be removed.

“Mr. Jones? Mr. Jones, are you there?” he hollered, knocking on the door. With no answer, he slowly turned the nob and let the slab of pine swing open. A putrid bloody odor washed over Jason, nearly making him gag. That was no dead bird.

Hammer in hand in which to defend himself, Jason slowly stepped into the house. Every movement of his feet, every inch he traversed, was like gripping hot metal as fear pumped through his veins like blood. He had seen this situation a thousand times in movies and it always ended bad. His heart was beating wildly in his chest, threatening to break open his ribcage, his body trembled to the point where it was nearly impossible to control, and his stomach felt like it had a noose around it and was bound to the doorframe. While doing so made him want to throw up, he forced his body to overcome the instinct to flee and moved towards the living room and dining room, glancing inside to make sure there was nothing dangerous hidden around each corner.

While there were no dead bodies, the walls were covered in mysterious symbols that he did not understand, as well as graphic phrases that only consisted of a few words but sent shivers down his spine. “ACHIEVE DEATH” “DROWN IN BURNING BLOOD” “SUFFOCATE IN DARKNESS” “ENDLESS SCREAMS” “FEAST UPON THEIR FLESH” “EUPHORIA OF ETERNAL SUFFERING AWAITS US” “LET GORE RAIN FOREVER”. These were but some of the horrible things Jason read, and if they weren’t carved into the drywall, they were written in blood.

He should have left right then and there, he should have run as fast as he could and called the police, but while he was more terrified than ever in his life, something was drawing him deeper into the house, almost like he was walking downhill. The air seemed thinner in front of him, while weighing heavy on his back and shoulders, as if the air itself would not let him turn back. He felt sick to his stomach, like liquid fear would start streaming from his pores instead of sweat, but he could not leave.

At last, he reached the kitchen, but he did not feel the hammer slip from his hand or hear it hit the floor with a dull thud. His entire mind was focused on the view before him. The island table that stood in the center of the kitchen was caked in blood, with streams of the hard red crust running down the cabinets underneath like wax from a candle. Ropes had been tied to the four corners of the table, forming makeshift restraints with the table lined with fingernail marks. Coin-sized bits of human flesh covered the ground as if a piñata full of confetti made from skin had been ripped open in the kitchen. There were hundreds, no, THOUSANDS of half-dried peels covering the floor! On the surface of the table, on top of the layer of blood, there were also countless pieces of skin that looked like they had been burned.

On the floor at the end of the table was a pile of hair, shaved off of whoever had clearly died in this room, and sitting atop the mound was a chewed-up dishrag with a sheet of duct tape clinging to it. Most likely it was some kind of gag. On the surrounding counters, various instruments lay strewn about, each one painted with a rusty layer of gore. Butcher knives, pliers, wire, a box cutter, a blowtorch, and even a soldering gun were in full view.

Leaning over, Jason released the contents of his stomach onto the floor, just adding to the gruesome mess. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, this was beyond horrifying, this was soul-scarring! He had eaten in this very kitchen, he had sat at that island table! He had walked where chunks of human flesh now lay scattered like packing peanuts! But as he raised himself up, something caught his eye. Sitting on one of the stools for the table was a spike of metal. Measuring about four inches long and with four flat sides, the thick nail of black iron stood upright with its point aiming upwards like an Egyptian obelisk.

Staring at the nail, Jason nearly staggered as he felt its image enter his mind, not from looking at it, but as if he were a computer and a picture of the nail had been emailed straight into his brain. The image… it was so vast. He felt like he was standing at the base of the Washington Monument, trying to comprehend the spire’s size while being unable to see anything around it. In his mind, his memories were pushed back to the very fringe of his consciousness as the nail took his full attention and thought. In seconds, he could not look away or think of anything but the nail. With every attempt to shift his mind to another topic or draw up a memory, the image of the nail would appear, foreboding and ominous in ways he could not describe.

Suddenly, a flash popped in his mind and the image disappeared. He shook himself back to reality and looked around. That’s right, he had to call the police.



Jason sat on Tim’s porch with his parents on either side of him. He was shaking like a leaf while forensic investigators streamed in an out, entering with cameras or leaving with filled evidence bags. He had been questioned over and over by the police, grilled on everything he knew about Tim, his daughter, and even his dead wife.

“Alright, you folks can go, but we’ll be in touch,” one of the police officers said as the sun approached the horizon.

“Ok, come on, honey,” Jason’s mom said softly, pulling him to his feet and leading him back home.

As they walked through the moat of tall grass that separated the two properties, Jason reached into his pocket and rested his hand on the nail. He did not know why he had taken it; it was as if a voice had whispered in his ear.





Chapter Two



“Who’s there?! Who are you?!” Jason shouted, kneeling in an endless sea of darkness.

No matter how hard he pressed his hands against his ears, he could not block out the sound of countless voices whispering to him. Half of the voices were completely incomprehensible, the rest repeated the phrases he had seen in Tim Jones’ home, as well as telling him to commit horrible, twisted crimes. These voices, he heard them with a depth that he had never before experienced. With normal noise, sounds met the ear and just stopped, but these whispers… it was as if his head was made of water and the whispers were ripples, able to move through every fiber of his being and leave no mental stone unturned.

“Kill them all.”

“Drown the world in blood.”

“Bask in eternal suffering.”

“Tear away your flesh and bleed forever.”

“Drink the tears of innocents.”

“SHUT UP!” Jason screamed, unable to bear the whispers violating the most secretive confines of his soul.

Pushing the whispers aside, a deafening crash like the snapping of a billion bones filled the darkness with such intensity that Jason thought his ears would bleed. At the same time, a bright red light shined overhead like a dying star. With it, blood began to rain from the sky, drenching Jason and the nonexistent landscape around him.

Jason bolted up his bed, soaked in a cold sweat and now hearing the beeping of his alarm. It was Thursday, the day after he had found that grisly scene in his neighbor’s house. It did not surprise him that he suffered a nightmare, but he had never experienced one with such vividness. As he reached out to turn off his alarm, his hand paused over the nail, the nail he had taken from Tim’s home. Four inches long with four flat sides, the spike of black iron looked like the kind of nail that would have been used in crucifixions by the Romans. If his parents knew he had taken something from the crime scene next door, they would freak out. He didn’t even know why he had taken it, but something would not allow him to leave it behind.

Reaching past the nail, he turned off his alarm and retrieved his cellphone. He had left an apologetic message on Christi’s phone and he was hoping she had replied before heading off to work. Being a Thursday, they were both off from classes, but only she had a job. His voicemail box was empty. Either Christi had not seen the message (unlikely) or she was ignoring him. Oh well, with the house empty, nowhere to go, and no homework to do, there was nothing left but a relaxing day of lounging.

Wearing the same clothes as yesterday, he left his room and sleepily made his way to the hall, but as he took the first step down the staircase, he realized that there was something in his hand. Gripped tightly in his fingers like a prison shiv was the nail. When had he picked it up? He didn’t remember ever even touching it. Turning back, he returned to his room and set the nail at its resting place on his bedside table. After staring at it a little longer than he should have, he left the room and closed the door, but acting in tandem with the click of the door latch, a dull thump echoed from Jason’s bedroom.

Thinking the nail had fallen off the table, he reopened the door and looked around. No, the nail was right where he had left it. But what if it did fall? What if it slipped behind the table and he couldn’t find it? He would spend the day tearing his room apart in search of it, or accidently step on it and hurt himself… Best to be safe.

With the nail in his pocket, Jason began his morning routine.



Even with the much-needed day off, Jason could not relax. The TV played show after show and he had the limitless possibilities of his laptop, but he just couldn’t get comfortable on the couch. Every thought in his mind drifted back to what he had seen the day before and to the nail in his pocket. He continuously adjusted its position, trying to get it to feel right, but no matter what he did, he always felt like he had to grab it and change its position.

Eventually, he found his way back to his favorite porn site. Scrolling down the front page, he started selecting any movies that piqued his interest. While the movies rolled on mute, Jason’s attention constantly shifted from the porn to the TV, and back again, not quite applying any real focus to either stimulus. In time, the graphic images sunk into his psyche and he felt the urge to rub one out. Moving upstairs to his bathroom, he got himself all positioned and ready and looked for a good video to jack off to.

He soon settled on a lesbian bondage video. Manhood in hand, he started the clip and carefully raised the volume to a soft yet audible level, knowing that there was no one home but always afraid of being heard. The scene started with a busty brunette milf secured in handcuffs to a brick wall. Long black hair, thick full thighs, a stomach kept as flat as possible no matter what the cost, colossal tits that were as fake as they were glorious, and a cute face that showed her age. The years had certainly been very kind. She was wearing a purple dress and had a gag in her mouth.

While the victim put up a fake struggle against her restraints, player no. 2 strolled into the frame. Slightly younger and with blonde hair, her glistening leather outfit broadcasted the part she was playing. The greeting was played out, the sexy blonde leaning over and grabbing the brunette’s face and murmuring how she was going to ruin her. The punishment began with the ripping away of the purple dress, letting her braless tits bounce freely. At the sight of those glorious fun-bags, Jason’s heart rate jumped into a frenzy as he imagined wrapping his tongue around her erect nipples. Goddamn, her skin looked softer than velvet, and imagining his cock resting between her tits, smothered by them, sent a shiver up his spine.

The brunette rolled her head from side to side, feinting disgust or Humiliation as the blonde leaned down and fulfilled Jason’s fantasy, wetting the woman’s areolas with her tongue. She licked them both gently, humming to herself while reaching down and releasing the hold of the brunette’s panties. Lowering her head even more, the blonde traced her tongue down her toy’s stomach, letting it gently flick the lips of her experienced pussy. The brunette emitted a stifled whine of arousal as her mistress’ tongue rolled around in her interior. Jason couldn’t help but wonder how it tasted, if it was the same as Christi’s or any of his past girlfriends’.

Swinging back to get her goldenrod locks out of her face, the blonde smiled and began petting the brunette’s slit with her hand, polishing her fingers with a wet gleam. Biting her lip, she inserted her middle finger up into her slave’s pussy, spreading her lips and making her whine through her gag. Whether it was to cause her pleasure or pain, the blonde began forcing her finger into the brunette’s pussy with sadistic speed, moving her hand into a blur while her slave moaned and cried out.

Seeing how roughly she was being treated, how she screamed masochistically through her gag, the movements of Jason’s hand increased in intensity as he watched the brunette’s sexual abuse. After thoroughly loosening up the brunette, the blonde retrieved a large vibrator and secured it between the brunette’s legs. Powered by a wall socket, the bulbous head of the “neck massager” began to buzz with a deep hum. With the hard rubber shaking against the spread lips of her pussy, the brunette released a scream of ecstasy through her gag, while the blonde continued to toy with her. As the vibrator worked its magic, the blonde stood up and resumed sucking on the brunette’s balloon-like tits, stimulating her perfectly in two different points.

In time, the vibrator and gag were discarded and the brunette changed her position. Now secured with her face to the wall, she had her purple dress fully removed, granting the camera a perfect view of her peachy white ass. Again, she made a few pulls at her restraints, trying to make it look like she was being held against her will or some other shtick like that. After about a minute given to the viewer to admire the brunette’s cushioned milf ass, the blonde returned to the frame, now with a flayed whip in her hands.

Giggling to herself, she delivered a playful slap to the brunette’s rear end, letting the black latex strands lick the woman’s flesh like a hundred thin tongues. At the sting of the whip, the brunette cried out in another mixed bout of pleasure and pain. Again and again the short whip struck her, letting her yelps echo through the set, and while her cries were very sexy, Jason suddenly found himself unsatisfied. He wanted more; he wanted more pain, more Cruelty. He didn’t know where this desire came from, but it was ravenous in its intensity.

Clicking the “rough” keyword link in the description, he scrolled down through the results until he saw a familiar video. It was the kind of video that almost everyone on the site had seen. Jason had certainly skimmed through it a couple times, though something of this level never aroused him. It consisted of about five guys brutally gangbanging a girl; slapping her around, spitting on her, stepping on her face, etc. The whole time she looked stoned out of her mind or terrified. A lot of people called it rape, but apparently the girl was actually a real porn actress and she did all her movies in this style. As expected, the comment section was a battlefield of

“It’s rape!”

“It’s not rape.”

“This is sick!”

“This is fake.”

“She’s a victim!”

“She’s an actress.”

“You’re all messed up in the head! Shame on you!”

“You’re watching it too.”

“Kik me at blah blah blah.”

“Why do people go to this page when there is this great porn site yadayadayada.”

“My girlfriend thought it would cool to cheat on me, check out these pictures I took of her at whatever.”

Jason only masturbated to girl on girl and skimmed through regular porn when he was bored, but he found himself watching this video intensely. He was no longer jacking off; he now had his chin resting on his hands with a hungry look in his eye. He imagined himself in that room, taking part in the abuse. Whether the “rape” was real or not, he imagined it as being authentic with him as one of the perpetrators. This was completely out of his character. Sure, what he did to Christi was a sleazy move, but he could never rape anyone or even fantasize about it. Yet here he was, dreaming of the role he would play.

He imagined himself pulling her by her ankles across the filthy wet mattress and forcing his manhood into her gaping anus, hammering her with all of his strength while the other guys took turns forcing her to suck them off until she vomited. He imagined pulling her hair and smacking her makeup-smeared face, calling her a filthy whore and ramming his cock into her mouth. The gargling sounds of choking she would make and the foaming bubbles brought on by her attempts to breathe made his muscles twitch. He imagined watching as the other guys took turns with her, punishing every orifice and humiliating her on camera. In his mind, he pushed aside the guy with the ridiculous beard and took her for himself, ramming her pussy as hard as he could with her hands around her throat.

He dreamed of forcing his manhood into her brutalized body over and over again, dominating her and turning her into a piece of garbage. He fantasized about spitting on her, insulting her, slapping her, and dragging her around by her throat. He imagined fucking her bruised body with his hands around her neck, always around her neck. But as the fantasy progressed, his hold around her neck became a growing choke, with his hands evermore tightening and making her gag and gasp for air. Whenever she was just about to pass out, he would wake her up with several hard smacks to the face, bruising her before stuffing his cock into her mouth while she was disoriented. Then he would sodomize her, holding onto her neck from behind and fucking her asshole in the doggy-style position. Biting his lip, he would move as fast as his body would allow, making her scream and beg for mercy and cry in pain and humiliation. To answer her, he would donkey-punch her repeatedly, shutting her up even though her pitiful cries excited him.

By now, Jason was so deep in the fantasy that he felt like he was standing in that room in real time, as if that were his reality. He was on the bed, shooting load after load into her anus while she cried out. The other guys were gone, there were no cameras; it was just him and the girl in this very real rape. Once he ejaculated, he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her over. Silencing her screams, he forced his cock once again into her mouth, with the head and shaft drenched in his semen and her ass fluid. Once she sucked him clean, he pulled his dick out and rubbed it across her face while spitting on her, further smearing her makeup.

Still not satisfied, he pulled back his fist and punched her square in the face, breaking her nose. She screamed in agony and tried to cover her face, but the resulting stream of blood running down her chest only excited Jason further. Holding her up by her hair, he again punched her, this time in the stomach. She buckled over with the air knocked out of her and Jason continued with another punch to the face, whipping her head back and painting his knuckles red. She fell on her back on the mattress and he was immediately upon her. While beating her senselessly with his left hand, he forced the fingers of his right hand into her bruised pussy. Grabbing ahold of the side of her slit from the inside and outside, he squeezed brutally hard and pulled, tearing her insides with his fingernails and causing her to bleed profusely.

Ripping his hand out of her, he returned to her face and continued beating her. Over and over again his fists struck her face, impacting with animalistic strength and inhuman cruelty. Every time he pulled his fists back to punch her, he would fling his arm and splatter blood across the walls and ceiling, both her blood and his. This no longer had anything to do with sex or rape. It was all about inflicting as much pain as possible and making her suffer. At last she passed out, her face completely unrecognizable, but Jason couldn’t let her go just yet.

Grabbing the sides of her head, he pushed down on her eyes with his thumbs. Quickly the pain woke her back up and she screamed as he steadily pushed harder and harder, grinding his teeth and nearly foaming at the mouth. With a satisfying crunch, he pulverized her eyeballs and gouged them out of her skull. Fountains of blood shot in all directions and her screaming reached new levels of volume. Deciding her agonizing screams were more annoying than exhilarating, Jason reached down and bit into the side of her neck as hard as he could, tearing through muscles and veins with his teeth.

Pulling away, he ripped her jugular vein and a mouthful of flesh out of her neck, and immediately the girl began to bleed out onto the bed. Jason took a few moments to chew on her flesh and savor the taste of the meat and blood, then swallowed and dove back in. This time, he clamped his jaws down around her windpipe and tore it out, robbing her of the ability to breathe. Now suffocating and bleeding to death at the same time, the girl couldn’t stop Jason from assailing her face with his teeth.

KNOCK KNOCK

The hard tap on the bathroom door nearly threw Jason into a heart attack.

“Jason? Honey? Are you in there?” his mom asked.

“Yeah… sorry. I was watching a movie and lost track of time!”

Looking down he saw the screen of his laptop had gone dark. He pressed the power button but nothing happened. Were… were the batteries drained? That’s impossible, he had at least three hours of energy when he went to the bathroom! And why was his mom home, she didn’t get off work until… Jason threw himself at the bathroom window, feeling the blood drain from his face as the dropping sun met his view, saying its final goodbye before setting early on this fall evening.

‘How is that possible? How could SIX HOURS pass by without me even being aware of it?!’

Was it true, had he been sitting on the toilet for six hours, not even aware of the passage of time, completely hypnotized by some twisted fantasy that made him sick to his stomach with guilt and self-loathing?! Never in his life, in his wildest dreams or nightmares, had he even thought of doing something so horrible. Rape, murder, Cannibalism?!

“What the fuck is wrong with me?!”



“So how’s Christi doing?” Colleen asked, speaking from across the dinner table. While her right hand was working a forkful of haddock, her left hand was under the table with her thumb tapping methodically on her phone.

“She’s ok, I guess. She and I had a fight and she’s been giving me the silent treatment.”

“Why is she mad? Did she find the playboys under your bed?” his sister teased.

“Colleeeeeeen…” their mom hummed warningly.

“Colleen, it’s 2016. The only people with playboys are those who don’t have access to the Internet or are holding onto them for the future collector value,” Jason shot back.

“Well I hope you two fix everything, I always liked that girl,” his father sighed.

“Dad, all this time you’ve said that she has the personality of plain Cheerios.”

“Well yeah, when you’re with her. When she’s gone, I see her as the possible mother of my grandchildren. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.”

“Please tell me you don’t see me that way,” said Colleen.

“Of course not, if you get pregnant now, I’ll kill you, but once you’re done with college, I want more grandkids than I can count. I want you to start firing them like machine gun.”

“DAD!” Colleen screeched in embarrassment.

Before the conversation could continue, Jason’s mom cleared her throat loudly. “That’s ENOUGH. Let’s talk about something else. Oh, that reminds me, I saw…”

The conversation became muted, at least to Jason. He sat in his chair, chewing slowly with his face focused on his plate. Around him, his parents and sister’s mouths were moving but no words were being spoken. Everything was mute to him, even the food being mashed between his teeth. For some reason he felt very calm, as if he were a car running on cruise control. His body was moving automatically and there were no thoughts in his mind. In the lowest possible level of his hearing, so quiet that he wasn’t sure it was there or not, he heard something. He could hear a whisper, or even several whispers overlapping each other. He had no idea what they were saying, but as the seconds became minutes, they grew in volume until they filled the void left behind by the silence. Very soon, the whispers dominated his mind, as if he were wearing headphones plugged into a radio set to a static channel.

As this was going on, his hand was in his pocket, gripping the nail he had taken from Tim Jones’ house.



Jason was again on his knees, kneeling in a sea of darkness with a deafening choir of whispers forcing him to cover his ears in utter futility. Was this same dream going to happen every night? Was he going to be suffering nightmares for the rest of his life? This time, however, the whispers were clearer. Most of the whispers were just a general mash of commands for him to commit horrible crimes, but several seemed to actually be giving him directions.

“Capture a sacrifice.”

“Destroy the humanity.”

“Teach them despair.”

“Inscribe the horror!”

“Pierce their soul!”

“SPREAD THE CHAOS!”

“SHUT UP!” Jason screamed as the whispers suddenly jumped to an eardrum-rupturing howl.

The instructions were repeated over and over again, with the volume increasing with each sentence in the cycle before dropping back down to a whisper.

“Achieve death.”

“Achieve death!”

“ACHIEVE DEATH!”

“Please, just leave me alone!” Jason cried out in the darkness.

Just like in the previous dream, the voices were brushed aside by a new sound, the sound of a cataclysmic crash similar to the snapping of billions of bones. A bright red light flared in the black sky above, hovering as a beacon of both hope and despair. Without a cloud in sight, blood fell from the sky like rain, drenching Jason and the surrounding landscape in gore. He sat there, knowing that there was no place to hide and that there was nothing he could do but try and keep it out of his mouth and eyes. However, the intensity of the downpour only increased in power with the passage of time, quickly becoming a thundering deluge that hammered Jason into submission.

Within minutes, the blood had completely blinded Jason and was running down his throat, no matter how tightly he kept his mouth shut. The salty iron taste excited him for some reason that he did not understand, just like when he suddenly went berserk in his fantasy and started beating the girl from the porn video. The blood made him both happy and enraged. It made him want to rape, torture, and murder. It made him want to light the entire world on fire and slaughter every living thing in his path.

Without warning, something in the blood changed. Instead of exciting him, it filled him with absolute terror. He felt like something was standing over him, something abominable and unparalleled in its wrath, like it was staring straight at him and planning its first strike. Kneeling on all fours with his head bowed, Jason shivered as wave after wave of blood broke against his back, waiting to feel some hand grab him or a blade tear through his flesh. He could feel it closing in, wrapping around him like a straightjacket and weighing down upon his soul like his own tombstone. This evil, what in the world was it?!

The whispers now returned, but instead of giving him orders, they were now mocking him and calling him helpless.

“You can’t fight.”

“You can’t defy.”

“You will obey.”

“You will suffer until the end of time.”

“Your flesh will be pealed from your bones.”

“Your blood will fill the air.”

“Your bones will be crushed into shards.”

“You will drown in the tears of your agony.”

“Darkness will enslave you!”

“Your soul will be devoured for eternity!”

“ACHIEVE DEATH!”

Jason bolted up in his bed, finally awake and free of the nightmare. It was the middle of the night, and just like the night before, he was drenched in a cold sweat and shaking like a heroin addict going through withdrawal. He reached up to wipe the sweat from his face and realized something was in his hand. It was the nail, and he was gripping it so tightly that the edges along the four sides had cut his palm. Putting it down on his bedside table, he rushed from his bedroom and into the bathroom. Momentarily blinded by the activation of the lights, he squinted his way past the shower and to the sink, where he turned on the faucet and held his bleeding hand under the water.

Slowly becoming accustomed to the light shining through his eyelids, he opened his eyes and looked at himself in the mirror. The sight that greeted him was not pretty, and he found himself gasping in disbelief. Blood from his palm had completely plastered his body, as well as scratches and cuts across his torso from holding the nail. Beneath the dried gore, his face was deathly white while his eyes were horribly bloodshot. He looked back down at the sink and found himself staring at the nail standing straight up on its flat head on the counter, still wet with his blood.

No, that was impossible! He knew he had left it in the bedroom!

Jason staggered back in fear, realizing the truth now. These nightmares, these hallucinations… they were all brought on by the nail. That… thing, whatever it was, had to be cursed or something!

Grabbing the nail, he forced open the bathroom window and pulled his arm back, about to chuck the metal spike out into the night, but with the frigid air now nipping his skin, Jason couldn’t move. He was as still as a statue, trying to work up the nerve and the courage to throw the nail and be rid of it. Yet no matter how strong his will, his body would not obey his commands. In fact, with his own body resisting him, fear was building in his heart. This fear was familiar to everyone, the fear of being about to commit a death-defying stunt. This was the fear that held you in place instead of jumping off a cliff or into a lake, the fear that kept you from letting go of the swing as a child and seeing how far you could go, the fear that made you pull your hand away at the sight of a spider or snake. This fear should not have been ignited at this time; it should have been the driving force in making him dispose of the nail. It was as if his fear was being turned against him, harnessed as a weapon to weaken his resolve.

‘All right, I won’t get rid of it.’

His muscles immediately relaxed and he walked over the window to close it. However, just as his free hand was going to lower the glass pane, he forced his right hand out into the cold with the nail in his grip. Sweat poured from his face as he tried to get his fingers to unravel, but it was as if his hand had turned to stone. This nail was controlling him! It wouldn’t allow him to let go of it!

“What the fuck is going on?!”



Sleep didn’t come easy that night, his mind was buzzing nonstop about the nail. He should have never taken it from his neighbor’s house. Was this thing the reason why Tim Jones had gone crazy and killed someone in his kitchen? Were Jason’s dreams really tied to this piece of metal? At last he managed to get a couple hours of fitful sleep, and when he woke up, he was convinced that the whole thing was just in his mind. Of course the nail wasn’t cursed. He was just imagining it. The stress of the semester mixed with his shaky relationship with Christi and the horrible things he had seen in his neighbor’s home were just getting to him and making him irrational. Once he figured everything out with his girlfriend and got his shit together at school, everything would sort itself out.

For a reason he did not understand, he decided to take the nail with him. Of course weapons of all kinds were forbidden from the premises of SMCC so if anyone saw the nail they might think it was dangerous. He would just have to keep it hidden and hope that anyone who did somehow see it would not care or believe him when he said it was just a good luck charm.



Jason sat out in front of Christi’s home, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. If he didn’t leave soon, he would be late for class, but he couldn’t let this go. Christi hadn’t returned any of his calls or texts and her car was still in her parent’s driveway. Unless she had gotten a ride with her dad, she was here, and he would wait for her until she finally came out to ride with him to the university or tell him that it was over and she wanted him off her property.

At last, with clock approaching the minimum time either party would have to get to their classes, Christi’s front door opened up and she stepped outside. Jason stood up out of his car and watched as she approached him with a stoic look on her face.

“So are we going?” he asked, unsure of what else to say.

“I am, but not with you.”

“Come on, Christi. Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”

“Overreacting?! There was one thing I told you not to do and you did it, you did it without even asking me and after I had just warned you! And to think you actually had the nerve to pull that stunt when I was being so generous!”

She was choosing her words carefully, since her family was still inside going through their own routines.

“Look, I’m sorry, ok? I lost control and did something I shouldn’t have. If I could take it back, I would, but there is no excuse. But don’t let one incident end our relationship. Never have I lied to you, cheated on you, or mistreated you. Are you really going to break up with me over a single bad move?”

“It wasn’t just a bad move. I’ve been a very easy-going girlfriend and never complained, but you broke my only rule.”

“And I’ll never do it again! I know I crossed a line, and I’m going to spend the rest of my life as far from that line as possible! Please, give me one more chance!”

Christi bit her lip. “Fine, come on over tonight, I’ll call and tell you when. But I’m driving to school on my own.”



While fixing his relationship with Christi had certainly raised his spirits, Jason was still unable to stay awake in his first class of the morning. After the rough night he had gone through, a lecture about reincarnation wasn’t exactly firing him up. His notebook before him, Jason struggled not to fall asleep, but he could barely focus, let alone keep his eyes open. He would have given a kidney to just stop time for a couple hours, lay his head down on his desk, and take a much-needed rest.

To the ticking of the clock in the background, Professor Nelson’s lecture melted into a meaningless droning river. Jason’s eyelids were so heavy, he felt like his entire forehead was sliding down his face and enveloping his eyes, like a sheet of snow devouring everything in an avalanche. His body felt warm, warmer than it had been a few seconds ago. His brain was beginning to ignore physical sensations and his muscles were slackening, causing his head to hang with his chin against his chest. All movement ceased, his eyes closed, and all outer stimuli were rejected.

SCREECH!

The sound of chairs moving across the classroom floor shook Jason awake and nearly made him jump. Professor Nelson was hollering about the assignment due next Monday, but all of the students were already busy retrieving their things and walking out the door. Great, another class wasted. With how little learning Jason was able to do, he would be lucky if he didn’t fail this class. Looking down to put away his things, his blood gained an icy chill.

ACHIEVE DEATH

These words had been scribbled onto his notebook over and over again, plastering the opened page with machine-like similarity. Once every line of the page had been used, the words appeared in a much larger font, scrawled diagonally across the paper. Had he really done this? Had he been writing in his sleep, replying the words he was hearing in his dreams?! How was this possible?!

Getting to his feet, Jason hurriedly began stuffing his things into his backpack, only for Professor Nelson stop him. The only two people in the room, the professor approached Jason as the frightened youth crammed his notebook into his backpack.

“Are you alright, Mr. Stevens?” the teacher inquired.

“Huh? What? Oh… yeah. I’m ok. I’m just really tired,” Jason said nervously.

“I heard on the news what you found in your neighbor’s house, it’s a real shame that you had to see something so horrible. I heard that the police still haven’t found Mr. Jones or figured out the identity of his victim. Oh well, at least you didn’t have to see the murder itself or the body, right?”

“Uh… yeah… I’m glad I didn’t have to.”

“Though from what I heard about the scene, I don’t know if the presence of a body would even be any more terrifying. I can’t imagine what I would do if I walked in on something like that, though I hope I would be able to make the right decision… whatever that would be. Would you say you acted wisely?” Nelson continued, walking aimlessly through the rows of half-desks with his back to Jason.

Jason stared at him, feeling more and more anxious. What was he getting at? “Yeah, I would say so. Though I wish I hadn’t thrown up on the floor. I know I didn’t make any mistakes or do anything stupid.”

The professor then turned to him with a very grim look on his face and in his eyes. “Then you knew not to take anything from the scene, right? You knew not to touch anything or steal anything that could be evidence?”

The question pierced Jason’s heart like an icicle, chilling his blood and filling him with fear only equaled by that time he spent in his neighbor’s house, looking for the source of the smell of blood. Was it possible? Did Nelson know about the nail?! Was he somehow involved in the murder?! Jason shook his head from side to side, momentarily unable to speak from how tight his throat now was.

“No, I didn’t take anything.”

Professor Nelson’s demeanor did not change, but he did turn away from Jason. “Very well, good to know. Glad you didn’t make a bad mistake. I suggest you get moving before you’re late for your next class.”

Once Jason left and the professor became the only person in the room, he drew his cellphone and selected a number on speed-dial. “It’s Nelson, I think I found the nail. Let’s hope we’re not too late.”





Chapter Three



The headboard to Christi’s bed was slamming against her wall with so much force that paint was chipping off the cracking plaster.

“Oh yes! Oh YES!” she screamed, lying on her back and clinging to the corners of the mattress.

Sitting on the soles of his feet with his hands on her thighs, Jason was thrusting into her with all the strength in his body. Christi’s parents had gone out to dinner with friends and her brother was out on a date, so they had the house to themselves and Christi was not holding her voice back. Trying desperately to keep up with her sexual hunger, Jason was gasping for air but also hypnotized by the sight of her glorious tits bouncing back and forth in countering circles. No question, makeup sex is the best.

With each thrust into Christi’s velvet sleeve, a deep pulse rattled through Jason’s cock, reverberating it and pushing aside even the slightest hint of softness. Goddamn, her pussy felt as soft as Vaseline-slathered latex crafted by angels. It felt so good to be inside her, Jason almost didn’t want to pull out, but the feeling wouldn’t be nearly as good without movement. To solve this, he was moving as fast as his body would allow, while using her bouncing breasts and the rocking of the bed as a gauge for his speed.

“Oh yes! Harder! Faster!” Christi screamed.

To satisfy her wish, Jason leaned over on all fours and began thrusting into her with his whole body, sacrificing speed for penetration. However, to keep up with her demand, he worked his muscles to the limit, especially the muscles in his stomach. By tomorrow morning, his celiac plexus would be completely unusable, and just sitting up in bed would probably kill him. Now bent over her, he ended her screams by sealing her mouth with his and letting her stick her tongue down his throat.

Barely a minute after getting used to this new position, Christi surprised Jason with a sudden shift. Like a ravenous animal, she grabbed him and completely flipped the two of them over so that she was now on top. With a coy smile on her face, Christi pushed Jason down onto his back and began grinding on his manhood.

“So is it safe to say you’ve forgiven me?” he asked.

In reply, Christi raised herself so that the shaft of his cock was exposed. Reaching down, she gabbed it with brutal strength. Against her grip, Jason tensed up like a cat with its tail stepped on and tried not to yelp in pain.

Christi now had an evil grin. “Not quite yet. You have to pay for what you did. So tonight, if you cum without me saying you can, I will make your life a living hell.”

Oh shit, the classic self-restraint punishment. Christi had done this before and it didn’t end well. He just had to give her a month of daily pedicures back then, but with the mood she was in… it might be better to cut his losses and run. As the thought of his escape crossed his mind, Christi let go of his cock and then slammed down onto it, driving it as deep into her womanhood as possible. Leaving him with no time to recover and grab a hold of his mental bearings, Christi began bouncing up and down on Jason like his dick was a pogo stick. Using the springs in her bed to launch herself higher into the air, Christi was pulling out all the stops to try and make Jason cum. Her tits were bouncing and rolling with such power that they looked like they would fly off at any second, while the cascading fusion of gasps and moans was like music to Jason’ ears.

Feeling her full body weight slam down onto his crotch over and over again while her soft, wet pussy tried to coax an orgasm out of him like it was siphoning gas, Jason was barely able to maintain any sense of control. Christi had never been this wild in bed. Sure, she was normally a real firecracker, but now she was truly ruthless. To try and fight the eruption building in the shaft of his semen volcano, Jason was drumming up the most soul-crushing thoughts in his archives. Parents in bathing suits, locker room full of old people, DMV, genocide, c-span, fat people on rascal scooters, Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, season two of the Walking Dead! SEASON TWO OF THE WALKING DEAD!

Of course it worked, but as usual, not in the way he imagined. With Christi riding him like a succubus on meth, there was no fucking way any thought in his mind could try and diffuse the bomb, but since he had these thoughts in his mind while he was rock-hard, he was so filled with self-loathing and shame that his manhood was feeling too embarrassed to maintain an erection. It was a cycle of both erection and deflation. With Christi’s efforts, the two forces cancelled each other out and he stayed hard as steel but without any chance of an orgasm.

With her thunderous bouncing not achieving the results she desired, Christi changed her tactics. Turning around to give Jason a perfect view of her ass, she leaned over on all fours and began vibrating her whole lower body like she had a martini mixer taped to her tailbone and was trying to shake up a drink that would leave James Bond breathless. Twerking on his manhood with the skill of a goddess, Christi left Jason barely able to think straight. Not only was her whole pussy massaging his cock like a fleshlight lined with vibrating rotors, but the sight of Christi’s perfect ass cheeks bouncing and clapping over and over again could not be topped.

The tightening of all the muscles in his pelvic region signaled his doom.
‘Oh shit, I’m cumming! Hold it! HOLD IT!’

As the building eruption within him churned, he couldn’t help but begin to squirm. Keeping a close watch on him, Christi saw the signs and doubled her effort. Shaking her ass like a wild plasma atom, she finally broke his will and summoned a pulsing white geyser from Jason.

Christi clicked her tongue disappointingly. “Shameful.”

“Listen (pant) Christi… (pant) If you (pant) could see it (pant) in your heart (pant) to just forgive me (pant)… I’ll EEEEEEEEIA!”

Jason gagged just as Christi reached down and jammed her middle and index finger into his asshole. At that moment, every fiber of his masculinity was torn like a severed Achilles tendon.

“Yeah, not so enjoyable is it?! Now imagine feeling this while your sitting in a car in a stuffed parking lot with your ass completely exposed! Now you know why I’m so pissed off!”

“Hey, I didIIIINT go that fOOOAr! You’re overreacting!” Jason yelped while trying to keep her out.

“One rule! I had one rule! If you break the rule, I’ll break the rule and break you!”

“Well then if you’re breaking the rule, I’ll break the rule!” he shot back, ramming his thumb up her ass and watching as every muscle in her body tensed up and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Turning back with a scowl, she pulled her fingers out to the first joint and rammed them back in, making Jason dry-heave and nearly jump out of his flesh. His pride on the line, he forced his other thumb into Christi’s asshole and spread them, letting him stare down into her back corridor.

At that moment, Jason forgot that Christi had her fingers in his ass and realized that he had his fingers in her ass… Goddamn, this was even sexier than that quickie in the car. With that realization running through his mind, his manhood regained its former glory with such power that Christi nearly jumped off his lap. Just like in the car, Jason began bucking his hips with all of his strength, bouncing Christi as if he were trying to buck her off.

“Stop it, you bastard! If you keep that up, I’ll—”



“And stay out!” Christi yelled as Jason ran naked out into her front yard, looking for his clothes, which she had thrown out the window.

So he had gotten sodomized, so his girlfriend had thrown him out; it was still a victory. He had great sex and Christi couldn’t deny that ass-play really worked for her. She came so hard that she actually squirted. Now there was nothing left to do but go home a champion and wait for Christi to call and say it was water under the bridge. After putting on his clothes with a confident smile, he got in his car and drove off… but not before setting himself down in the seat VERY carefully.



Jason banged his head against the back of his seat over and over, cursing at the sound of police sirens and sight of the red and blue lights flashing in his rearview mirror. Way to end a great night. Pulling over beneath a street light on a forest road, he quickly turned on the overhead light and rolled down the window, waiting with his hands clearly in view on the wheel. Supposedly, keeping your hands in view of the officer while they approached calmed any fears they might have had about an aggressive response and lowered the chance of them giving a ticket.

Reaching the car, the officer shined his flashlight straight in Jason’s eyes. “License and registration.”

Jason quickly did what he was told, trying to avoid doing anything that might make the officer think he was hostile and give him a ticket.

“Have you been drinking tonight sir?” the cop asked, skimming Jason’s license and the car registration.

“Uh… no. I haven’t done any drinking officer.”

This could go either way now: he really hadn’t done any drinking, so passing a breathalyzer test would be easy, but that thereby made him more responsible for any mistakes he might have made, and those mistakes could cost him.

“Well you were swerving across the road pretty erratically tonight, care to explain?”

“Sorry about that, officer. I fell down the stairs this morning and now I can’t sit down without wincing.”

That would have to be his lie; it was better than telling the truth and admitting he just received a brutal three-finger prostate exam from a wrathful girlfriend wanting vengeance.

“Sir, step out of the car.”

Shit.

In his condition, he doubted he could walk a straight line, and he couldn’t imagine how anyone reciting the alphabet backwards, sober or not. He would just have to hope that the officer would skip right to the breathalyzer. The officer stepped back and Jason climbed out of his car, wondering what would happen next. At least now he could see what the cop looked like. Early fifties, portly, and with a thin goatee.

“Now turn around and put your hands on the roof of the vehicle. I have to search you for weapons.”

‘Search me for weapons? Bullshit. This is turning into a bad porno. Never in my life did I think I would be praying to only be sodomized once in one night.’

The officer gave him a brief pat-down, checking all of his pockets and even sweeping him with a metal detector. Nothing was found, but then the cop shined his light on the backpack in the passenger seat of Jason’s car. The nail was inside.

“Take out that bag.”

“Hey, you need probable clause to search my car or anything inside it and I’m clean!”

“Take out the bag or I’ll arrest you for DUI right now!”

Feeling the situation spiraling out of control, Jason retrieved his backpack and handed it to the officer. There was nothing incriminating inside it, but with the way this stop was going, he wouldn’t put it past the cop to plant something. As he moved his wand over it, the alarm let out a screech right over the pouch that held the nail. Jason’s blood turned to glacial melt as the officer reached into the pouch and snatched the thick iron spike.

“Well now, what do we have here?”

“It’s just a piece of metal, a good luck charm. Unless that now counts as a drug or open container, you got nothing on me.”

“That’s it, you’re coming with¬—”

A sudden growl of static from the officer’s radio cut him off, hissing so loudly that it nearly made Jason jump. In the squad car nearby, the dash-mounted camera shut off and the small red and green diodes on the metal detector popped like bubble wrap. All of the hair on Jason’s neck stood on end as several whispers emanated from the radio on the officer’s shoulder, incomprehensible to both men.

“Who is this? Identify yourself!” the cop growled, speaking into the radio.

The whispers only continued, but the focus of officer and Jason were drawn away as the pool of light they were standing in from the lamp post above began to change in hue and turn red. They looked up, watching as the bulb filled with a crimson liquid, as if it were leaking in from the socket. Blood, the bulb was filling with blood, now bathing the two men in an ominous light. It was exactly like the light from Jason’s dreams, the blood-red sun.

“Oh my god…” the cop gasped, looking up at the crimson light and dropping the nail onto the ground.

High as whistles and as low as dying moans, a choir of blood-curdling screams exploded from the officer’s radio, each terrifying cry as loud as an air horn. The screams were mixed, portraying agonizing pain, traumatizing fear, a desperation to escape or be given death, and evil and wickedness that the human mind just could not comprehend. The screams pierced Jason’s skull like a dozen power drills, making him feel like he had just been hit in the forehead by a load of buckshot. Screaming in agony like the voices on the radio, he crumpled to the ground and fell on his back, staring up at the red light above, burning, almost angrily.

From the light, a symbol flashed in Jason’s eyes, almost as if it had fallen from the street lamp and landed on his face with the weight of a cinderblock. The symbol was simple in its design, a mere diagonal slash with one dot on the upper left side and two dots on the lower left. However, the symbol stamped itself on every memory in Jason’s mind, imprinting itself so that whenever he thought back to a scene from his past, that symbol occupied his full view like a fly on the contact lens of his mind’s eye. The symbol disappeared but a new one took its place, slamming Jason’s mind with the same physical force. A circle with a vertical line joined to the right side. Like the first symbol, it imprinted itself on every memory Jason had. Every time he drew up a mental image, the two symbols stood, the first resized to accommodate the second.

Over and over again, new symbols were branded into his consciousness, forcing so much information into his mind that he felt like his head would explode like an egg in a microwave. A few feet away, the police officer had ripped off his coat and was trying to silence his radio so that he wouldn’t have to suffer the screaming in his ear. Finally throwing it aside, he was about to help Jason when he felt a sharp pain on his right hand. Looking down, he spotted a large spider on the back of his wrist, same body shape as a black widow, but without the red markings.

Feeling his hand beginning to cramp up, he squashed the spider and wiped the remains off on his pants. A second sting on his left elbow signaled the beginning of a panic attack, and as he swatted the spider under his sleeve, he felt three more suddenly appear in his pants and sink their teeth into his flesh. Now yelling in terror and pain, he looked down to kill the arachnids and felt his heart nearly stop at the sight of thousands of spiders skittering across the pavement towards his feet. With their black bodies camouflaged with the road, it almost looked like a river of liquid shadows was running across the ground towards him.

Taking out his can of mace, he sprayed the acrid mist wildly at the ground around him, trying to create a moat that the spiders would not cross. His efforts failed and the spiders swarmed across his shoes and charged up his legs, ducking out of sight under his pants. Scrambling over each other in desperation, they sunk their fangs into his flesh and injected their poison. Feeling his body tighten up from the toxins taking effect, the cop gagged in pain and fell to his hands and knees. He was no longer able to swat at the spiders and they were free to swarm up his arms and cover his entire body.

More terrified than ever in his life, the seasoned officer watched as the abdomens of every spider seemed to melt into a thin dark liquid, only for him to realize that each spider was carrying its young on its back. As hungry as their parents, the black specks poured out across any exposed skin and immediately began tearing into him. Like piranhas stripping a cow, the spiders and their young peeled away layer after layer of flesh. The cop was able to give one last scream of agony before the ravenous arachnids forced their way down his throat and began feasting on his eyes.

The officer fell dead to the ground, killed from both the spiders’ poison and the shear amount of blood loss when they dug down deep enough through his flesh to rupture almost every surface vein on his body. Nearby, Jason had passed out, unable to withstand the mental force-feeding. With the nail having achieved its goal, the spiders lost their black shade and immediately abandoned their meal and fled, having regained control of themselves and now forming an expanding puddle in their exodus. Not a single spider or their young even approached Jason or the nail.

Once the spiders were gone, the nail slowly rolled away.



The sound of a beeping heart monitor was the first thing Jason could sense, the next was the feel of bed sheets and the pillow beneath his head, and the last thing he sensed was the cold bite of the metal handcuffs around his right wrist. Opening his eyes, he looked around while trying to figure out the last thing he remembered. He was alone in a hospital room with his wrist handcuffed to the side of the bed and a heart monitor clip on his finger. The air smelled like gauze and cleaning chemicals and the lights were blisteringly bright.

He rubbed his eyes repeatedly, believing his vision to be blurred. Everything he looked at seemed red, but as his eyesight sharpened, other colors came back into view. Instead of being red, every surface in the hospital room was covered in blood-red symbols, the same symbols that had been drilled into his head back on the street. It was as if his eyes were two projectors casting the image of all the symbols onto everything within his view.

“What the fuck happened to me?!”



“What the fuck happened to him?” the police commissioner asked, speaking to the mortician and standing over the carcass of Officer Michaels in the police station morgue.

The body was horribly swollen with the flesh looking like it had been decomposing for a month instead of twelve hours. The officer looked like an effigy of himself made of road-kill by a blind artist. The coroner was pulling off his gloves with shaky hands, trying over and over again to straighten the glasses on his lined face. The commissioner had the same build as the cop, but with gray hair and a clean-shaven face. At the head of the table stood Professor Nelson, taking a drag from a crooked cigarette. Due to the current situation, no one had bothered to tell him that smoking was not allowed in the building, especially in the morgue.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I found enough spider venom in his veins to wipe out a quarter of Portland. I don’t know how he managed to survive as long as he did. Look at all the damage to the outer layers of his skin; it’s the result of countless pairs of tiny fangs tearing into him like starving hyenas. Beneath it, the muscles have almost completely melted from the venom of the spiders. It appears to be some sort of neurotoxin,” the coroner said.

“Jesus, I thought we didn’t have any spiders of that caliber in Maine!”

“We don’t, and as far as the records show, no other place has them. I had the venom analyzed, and while many of the key proteins are found in every spider’s arsenal and only in the arsenal of spiders, no spider on Earth has this exact form of toxin. To be honest, I can’t rule it a murder because I just can’t for the life of me imagine how a human being could orchestrate this death. Unless the guy you found had just robbed a genetics laboratory and was trying to become Spiderman, he didn’t kill your man. If I had to guess, I’d say your man fainted out horror when he saw… whatever the hell did this.”

The commissioner turned to Nelson with his face contorted into a snarl. “This man had a wife and two kids! I knew him for fifteen years! Would you like to explain to me why you sent one of my best cops to his death?!”

Nelson took another drag from his cigarette and released the smoke in a cloud that shrouded his face. “Commissioner, if you value your life, your sanity, and your future, you’ll cremate this man before anyone outside of this room can see him, come up with a good lie, and tell it for the rest of your life. The feds have deputized me with full authority for this and even they don’t know what they’re dealing with, except for a very closed-circuit division. Trust me, what caused this man’s death is something that you want to steer clear from. I know you’re feeling like you would give anything to know the truth, but hear me and believe me: the answer will destroy you just like it did me.

Now I need to talk to everyone who came into close proximity with Officer Michaels and Mr. Stevens: the civilian who called 911, the EMTs, the ambulance drivers, the staff at the hospital, and anyone who was on that road tonight. But first, I need to know of Jason Stevens’ condition.”

“He’s awake but he doesn’t remember anything. He keeps saying he can barely see, his vision is messed up,” the commissioner sighed.

“All right, well if you have him here, I’ll try talking to him. He’s one of my students, so I might be able to pull something from his psyche. But I strongly advise that you cremate that body now.” About to exit the morgue, he turned back to the commissioner and mortician. “Was he wearing gloves?”

“What?” both men asked.

“Michaels, did he have gloves on when we set him up to pull over Jason Stevens? Did you do as I told you?”

“No gloves were found on his hands or at the scene,” the coroner shrugged.

“It’s a shame, this whole catastrophe could have possibly been avoided,” Nelson muttered as he walked out of the room.



Jason sat in the interrogation room, surrounded on all sides by cinderblock walls with a table bolted to the floor in front of him. The lights above flickered and buzzed repeatedly, and he had a feeling that the airflow to the room had been cut off. Just like in every movie and TV show, a wide two-way mirror occupied the wall in front of him. Was someone watching him? Jason was resting his forehead on the table, trying to remember what had happened the night before and figure out how he had come to this. There was no way he could have killed a police officer, no way! And these symbols, the symbols that covered everything like wrapping paper, it was because of them that his life was spiraling out of control. He even saw them when he closed his eyes, glowing like neon and making sleep almost impossible.

He perked his head up as he heard the flicking of lights nearby. Someone had turned the lights on in the observation room, making the two-way mirror a simple window. At the same time, the only door opened, and of all the people in the world to enter, it was Professor Nelson.

“Professor Nelson? What… what are you doing here?” Jason stammered, having felt his confusion now expand to new limits that he thought otherwise impossible.

Before speaking, Nelson put out his cigarette on the ground and sat down on the other side of the table. Reaching under the table, he checked to make sure the built in tape recorder was deactivated. This conversation had to be kept top secret, and with the lights on in the other room, he would know if someone was outside watching. The professor drew a folded sheet of paper from his coat and laid it out in front of Jason, with dozens of the symbols Jason now saw scribbled on in pen.

“I imagine at this point, you’re now seeing these symbols wherever you look, as if you have a big projector on top of your head that is shining them on every surface. Every time you try to draw up a memory, one of those symbols obscures the mental image. Am I correct?”

Jason didn’t know what to say, the professor had listed his predicament exactly. But of all people, why was HE here?

“How did you know that?”

“Because I’m the world’s foremost expert on the Black Stigmata,” the professor said while he held the paper over his cigarette lighter and let the flames destroy the evil written on it.

“The Black… what?”

Nelson took a moment to light up another cigarette. “Stigmata, they are the wounds one receives when they are crucified. As everyone knows, Jesus, the most famous case of crucifixion in history, had nails driven through his wrists and ankles. The nails of the Black Stigmata have nothing to do with Christ or with crucifixion for that matter, but it’s a fitting name. A Black Stigmata, that’s the cursed relic you found in the home of Tim Jones, the relic that has been haunting you for the past few days.”

Jason was left breathless, unable to believe that this simple teacher from Portland knew exactly what was plaguing him, when he could barely comprehend it. It also didn’t help that Nelson was now releasing thick clouds of smoke into the room.

“You knew?”

“I had a strong feeling, especially when I saw you writing frantically in your notebook when you were clearly asleep. I hold nothing against you for lying to me, no one in the possession of a Black Stigmata has the willpower to do anything that may result in them losing it.”

“You mean you knew before that?”

“Like I said, I had a strong feeling. Plus, as I mentioned before, I’m an expert. Every time one of those nails surfaces, the government contacts me and sends me information on the file for my consultation.”

“Wait, the GOVERNMENT knows about this?”

“How many times am I going to have to repeat myself? Yes, the government knows about the Black Stigmata, and so too does the UN and Interpol. There is a worldwide division, similar to the CIA, that focuses solely on the finding of these nails. BSC: Black Stigmata Containment. They have a branch in the FBI and every government organization around the globe, but they are kept secret to the public and even the leaders of their respective countries. The American branch keeps me on speed-dial. Now don’t jump to conclusions, this isn’t like the Avengers movie where we fly around in a giant hovering aircraft carrier.

What was I talking about…? Oh yeah, the BSC has me on speed-dial, and every time a Black Stigmata surfaces in America or there is a case in the world that is similar to a Black Stigmata surfacing but different in nature, I’m asked for a consultation. When the police investigated the Jones’ residence, their report was flagged, sent to BSC, and they in turn sent it back to me. Seeing as how this is happening in my own backyard and to one of my own students, I decided to play a larger role.”

“So if you’re an expert on these nails, do you know what they are?”

“I know what they do, but not what they are or where they came from. There are stories and written records about them dating as far back as the Sumerians and throughout every culture. However, in the cave paintings of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, we have found hints of their existence going all the way back to the Stone Age. We have thousands of reported cases before the birth of the modern world.”

“If you have so many cases, then why aren’t they more well-known? Why aren’t they ranked up their with the boogey man in urban legends?”

“Don’t be a smartass. There are three reasons: records are lost over time like every other piece of history, the BSC works to keep all knowledge of them out of the public eye, and the Black Stigmata are skilled at hiding their presence and destroying evidence.”

“Wait, they know how to destroy evidence? You mean they are alive?”

“If anything, they are anti-life, but each nail does have a consciousness of its own and they do seem to share a hive mind. They are incredibly cunning, knowing just when to activate, what psychological buttons to push, how to hide themselves, and how to get what they want. When it comes to their Hosts, they are like puppet masters.”

“What do they want?”

“To spread, to spread themselves and to spread death. There is no fixed number of Black Stigmata in the world because they are able to multiply like cancer cells and they can go dormant for years at a time. The nail you found could have been just a week old.

There is an ancient story from the Middle East, told by a monk who bore witness to the event. Several thousand years ago, a man stumbled out of the desert and into a small village. The desert was considered by many to be impossible to cross, due to its sheer size and lack of any oasis or landmarks, yet he somehow came out of its heart on foot. In his hand, he held a Black Stigmata. The man died as soon as the villagers reached him, and immediately, they were drawn to the nail in his grip.

Sensing death, the monk left the town and hid himself in his home in the outskirts, watching from his rocky crag. Speaking to them, the nail made the villagers believe that it was God, or one of his sacred relics at least. It showed them great and terrible things, twisting their minds until they served it fanatically. In the course of one night, it brought the deaths of everyone in the village. By the time the sun rose, the soil was red with blood, bodies were strung up in grotesque forms and ripped to pieces, signs of cannibalistic orgies were prevalent, and countless nails had been born.

The monk abandoned his home and fled to the nearby village to tell everyone what he had seen. When people tried to find the village, the desert had swallowed it up.”

“What do you mean the nails were born?” Jason asked, feeling the story fly right over his head.

“Capture a sacrifice. Destroy the humanity. Teach them despair. Inscribe the horror. Pierce their soul. Spread the chaos. Sound familiar?” Jason’s face became pale. “Capture a sacrifice is simple to understand: you find a living person and you kidnap them.

Destroy the humanity: if it’s a woman, you rape her repeatedly. If it’s a man, you sever the genitals and force-feed them to him. After that, regardless of gender, you cut off their breasts/pectorals, cauterize the pelvic region to destroy all traces of the genitalia or what genitals HAD been there, and then you slit the throat as if to destroy the Adam’s apple. The slitting of the throat is actually done later. When those steps are performed, you are left with a genderless Homunculus that represents all of humanity and yet has no humanity.

Teach them despair: torture them while trying to leave as much flesh intact as possible. Most often this is the breaking of the digits, the use of water or electricity, sodomy, or damage inflicted to the mouth. Inscribe the horror: shave the victim of all hair and then begin carving the symbols you see onto their body, fully removing the flesh and then cauterizing the wound so that they don’t bleed to death.

Pierce their soul: after you’ve done all that, you then slit the throat as I mentioned before, as if destroying the Adam’s apple, even if your victim is a woman. Then before they can bleed to death, you drive two objects into their eyes. It doesn’t matter what objects you choose, as long as they are remotely pointed and somewhat like a nail. Anything can be used; toothpicks, crayons, knives, pencils, sticks, broken glass, markers, carrots, or anything of the sort. I’ve actually seen one victim with their thumbs severed and shoved into their eye sockets.

Once you do it, watch and be amazed as the objects you chose transform into new nails, just like the one that haunted you and taught you how to do this. You see, in torturing your victim and inscribing the symbols into their body, you are essentially making them into a battery of agony and negative energy. Their souls become so twisted that even those who have been rescued and received medical attention before the ritual has been completed go insane and die.”

“But why the eyes?” Jason asked, having thrown up in his mouth twice already as the ritual was listed off.

Nelson flicked aside his cigarette and leaned forward with his clasped in front of his face. “Two reasons: The first reason is that the existence of two eye sockets allows for more effective multiplication of the nails. The second reason is that the eyes are the windows to the soul. When the objects you choose are jammed into the eyes after the ritual is performed, the toxic mix of suffering and malice bubbling within the victim’s soul pours into those objects. The symbols you carved into their flesh are the encryption for a nail’s mind, like the binary code of a piece of software. The information of those symbols and the horror bubbling within the victim’s soul is imprinted onto the objects, turning them into Black Stigmata. Those nails are then able to cause the same madness and death as the one that forced you to perform the ritual. Once the nails are created, the victim is thus considered a Homunculus, as I mentioned before.

Spread the chaos: the body has to be taken to a place where it will be found or where it can poison the land. Homunculi don’t burn and don’t rot, and any place that bears them becomes completely lifeless. Put a body in the middle of the forest and in less than a year, a crater of lifeless trees will be formed, up to a kilometer in diameter. The body has to be left where someone will find it, so that they will be drawn to take one of the nails.

Once a nail picks a host, that host is unable to give up the nail. It doesn’t matter if they had to scrape the pulverized eyeball off the sides of the nail, they’ll take it and leave without ever telling anyone about the body. Then a second person will eventually come and take the other nail. Afterwards, the body is discovered and taken away by the authorities. While the Homunculus itself is still toxic and causes death, sickness, and dementia to whatever approaches, the removal of the nails takes away its ability to force people to perform the ritual. To date, we have never found a single corpse with the nails remaining in the eyes.

The Host who created the Homunculus must then either continue to create more incubators and nails or leave the original nail for someone else to find so that the madness starts all over again.”

Jason was struggling to breathe, feeling like his brain was melting and dripping out of his ears. How could this possibly be true? How could it be real? How could something like this possibly exist?! “Am I going to do that to someone?”

“Hopefully not. You’ve been separated from your nail, so unless you are within the range of it or another nail, the progression of your mental decay will slowly be reversed and its hold over you will wane. You will never be fully free of its influence, but you’ll be able to live a mostly normal life. However… if your dementia should continue its growth, you will enter a psychotic stage in which you will black out and end up committing horrible crimes with the Black Stigmata fully controlling you and your actions, preparing you for the ritual. You may wake up in an alley you don’t recognize, finding yourself with a stomach full of the flesh of the woman you just brutally raped and cannibalized only an hour ago without any memory of it.

Either way, you will have to be kept in isolation until the effects can wear off. Only when you no longer see the symbols wherever you look can I allow you to be released. You didn’t kill that police officer, but you’re close to entering that psychotic stage.”

“You’re going to hold me prisoner for something I didn’t do?! You can’t do that!”

“What part of “raping and eating a woman” did you not understand? You can’t be allowed to roam free. If you come within MILES of that nail, you could enter the psychotic state. Once the progression is complete, you won’t even need the nail in your immediate possession to perform the ritual, you’ll have the knowledge to do it on your own without the willpower to deny the nail’s orders.

Relax, you should be fine in about a month. At which point a mock trial will be held to cover everything up and you’ll be found innocent in that cop’s death. Until then, I’ll do you a favor and try to get you your schoolwork so that you don’t fail the semester. You’ll need something to distract you if you want to be free of the nail’s influence.”

“So there really is no way out of this?” Jason asked regrettably.

“Consider yourself lucky, we found you before you could advance any further. We would either have had to kill you or the ritual would be complete before we could stop you, at which point the nail would release you. What worries me is that these nails don’t usually progress so fast after being found. Normally it would be at least a month before you saw the symbols. However, there is something I must ask you before anything can be done.” Professor Nelson then reached across the table with frightful speed and grabbed Jason’s collar. “Where is the nail?!”



Colleen sat in Jason’s car, having been asked by their parents to pick it up from the impound lot and drive it home while they visited him at the police station. She was covering her eyes with her hands and crying in terror for her brother. There was no way Jason would kill a cop, he didn’t have it in him to do something so horrible! As long as she had known him, Jason had been a kind older brother. Sure, there were times when he could be an asshole, but he was never mean and it was not like he would ever hit her. But what if he did do it? What if he wasn’t the kind brother she thought she knew? No, he didn’t do it; she had to believe that no matter what. But what if he was innocent but the jury found him guilty? No, she couldn’t think about that either, it wouldn’t accomplish anything.

After taking several deep breaths to calm herself down, she climbed out of the car and into her driveway. She slammed the door behind her, but the sound of metal on metal told her something was in the way. With a quizzical look on her face, she opened the door to see what was jamming it. There was something sticking out of the base of the car seat. It was a piece of metal, about the size of a magic marker, but with four sides that slanted down to sharp tip.

Pulling it out of the car, she stared at it intently. ‘What is this, a nail?’





Chapter Four



Jason was lying on his back, spread eagle and howling in agony. Keeping him pinned to the ground were several strands of barbed wire, burrowing into his hands and feet like earthworms, while repeatedly surfacing only to dive back down. He could feel it all, every tearing slip of the metal blades severing veins and muscle cords, the splitting of his skin as they surfaced and submerged, and every drop of blood spraying from the shredded arteries. He had already lost so much blood, enough to die several times already, yet it still hissed from his ravaged body in steaming fountains. With nothing but darkness in all directions, he was desperately trying to repeat to himself that this was only a dream, yet it did nothing to lessen the horrifying pain being inflicted upon him.

As the wires dug through his flesh to reach his knees and elbows, the hard glass-like ground that he was laying on became soft and wet, as if he were laying on a bed of oiled latex. He looked around fearfully, wondering what new horror this was. Like in all his dreams, the bright red light shone down from the nonexistent sky above, finally allowing Jason to truly see.

An eye, the ground beneath him had been transformed into a giant human eyeball, with him lying pinned on its pupil. He could see every fiber in the blue iris quiver and tremble as the red light shined down and Jason weighed upon its surface. Without warning, the wires in this body suddenly made one great surge through his flesh, surpassing his knees and elbows and proceeding to now tear apart his thighs and biceps. At the same time, a familiar crash rang out, the sound of a billion bones being snapped at once, each with the volume of a flash-bang grenade.

As if heralded by the crash, crimson symbols appeared in the air around Jason. They were the symbols imprinted into his memories, having been forced into his mind by the nail. Almost materializing in thin air, they formed a cylindrical shape from the sides of the eyeball up to the red light above, making Jason feel like he was lying in the bottom of a well. Staring up at the light, he felt a shiver of terror crawl up his spine. From the bloody radiance, a colossal nail was lowered like the formation of a black icicle, all four sides gleaming and bringing with it a chorus of haunting whispers. As long as five school buses and with a head the size of a backyard trampoline, the nail slowly began to descend towards Jason.

Screaming in terror, Jason pulled at the wires that riddled his body, desperately wanting to escape but only worsening the damage inflicted to his limbs. The whole time he thrashed and tugged, his eyes never left the approaching nail, slowly lowering itself towards him like he was a fly caught in the web of a black widow. He could feel it, the immeasurable evil within the nail. It was like staring a psychopath square in the eye, times a million. He knew what it wanted: to bring death, to invoke horror, to cause suffering, to spread, and to drown the world in darkness.

Unable to escape from it, Jason chewed on his lip furiously, watching as the tip of the nail approached his stomach. He hopelessly sucked in his gut, knowing it would spare him only a second of pain. With unchanging speed and weight, the tip of the tail touched down on his navel, then slowly pressed down. Before Jason could truly prepare for it, the metal pierced his flesh and Jason released a scream of pain as the nail delved deep into his torso, moving slowly, hauntingly. The farther it moved into his gut, the wider it expanded the wound, all the while the corners of the four sides cut his skin like razor blades and blood poured down his sides.

After puncturing his stomach and letting gastric acid and blood flush through his torso cavity, the tip of the nail reached his spine. Without any change in speed, it pushed down on one of his vertebrae and broke it like a small clay pot under a guillotine. The nail severed Jason’s nerves without any issue, sending a bolt of pure, unhindered pain straight to his brain, leaving him in too much agony to even scream. Continuing to drop, the tip of the nail came out of the skin of his lower back and touched the very middle of the pupil of the eye beneath Jason.

Piercing the liquid membrane, the nail triggered the flaring of every blood vessel in the eyeball, with the pupil dilating and shrinking frantically over and over. The nail drove deeper and deeper into they eye, all the while slowly ripping Jason in half with the expanding wound. Even with his nerves severed, he could still feel everything below the wound, from the tearing of his flesh to the barbed wires still riddling his legs. Not only that, but all the damage that the eye was sustaining, his own eyes were sustaining. He could feel it in each eye, a nail being driven deeper and deeper into his pupils, quickly blinding him.

After the nail reached a certain depth, the eye completely ruptured into a shredded marsh of layered gelatin. Now, not only was the nail piercing him through and expanding his wound, it was pushing him down into the foamy mess. Completely blinded and crippled, Jason thrashed with what little strength he had left, trying to keep his head above the surface of the eye fluid. Refusing to let him have that one escape, the nail forced him all the way into the sludgy liquid, leaving him to struggle and slowly drown like a dinosaur in a tar pit.

Jason bolted awake, and in the process fell off his tiny cot and onto the cold cement floor. Never had he been so happy to wake up in prison. Well, that wasn’t quite right. In the week since he had been “arrested” for the death of a cop, he had woken up from every stretch of sleep drenched in sweat after suffering more agony than he ever thought possible. Was this what drug withdrawal was like? In his dark 8 by 10 foot cell, Jason tremblingly pulled himself over to the small sink above his toilet and splashed some water in his face.

Seven days in prison were bad enough, but he had three more weeks to look forward to, and with the influence of the nail poisoning his mind every single second. Ever since he had come to this place, his nightmares seemed to have worsened in their horror and pain. The nail was no longer with him, but he could feel its malicious will weighing down upon his mind as if he were in a trash compacter. It had gone past the regular nightmares and was providing the instructions that Professor Nelson had listed, the instructions for the ritual of creating new nails. But was it really trying to force him to perform the ritual, or was it perhaps angered that he had been separated from it and was now punishing him?

Oh well, things could be worse. For both his protection and the protection of his fellow inmates, he was kept from the general population and locked in solitary confinement. Since he wasn’t really “incarcerated”, he was allowed outside at times for visits from his family, girlfriend, and Professor Nelson. Whether absence really did make the heart grow fonder or she had finally admitted to herself that she liked ass-play, Christi seemed to have fully forgiven him, though they weren’t able to have conjugal visits.

Plus, with his own private jail cell and nothing but time on his hands, he was finally able to get his act together on his schoolwork. To try and distract himself from the nail’s influence, he read every book he could get his hands on and was way ahead in his classes. Professor Nelson visited him almost every day with missed schoolwork from all his courses and to check on his recovery. For his cold demeanor, he certainly was not one to ignore someone in pain. Lastly, since he was in solitary confinement, he didn’t have to deal with other inmates. That of course meant not getting raped in the ass, and not getting raped in the ass is always a good thing.

But his life was still hell. The symbols that the nail had imprinted in his mind had not left; he still saw them whether his eyes were open or closed. If he ever managed to fall asleep, it was never for more than an hour or so at a time, and when he did sleep, he always suffered the most horrific and painful nightmares. Even when he was awake, he was not free of the nail’s influence. Throughout the day, he would experience hallucinations and hear the haunting whispers in his ear, telling him to set loose unspeakable horrors onto the world and commit crimes that made him sick. Besides, even though he was able to visit with Christi and his family, he missed the sunlight.



“I had the stabbing dream again, where I’m on top of a giant eye and the nail runs me through. I can feel it ripping me to shreds, even now,” Jason muttered, speaking with Dr. Nelson in the visitation chamber of the prison.

Unlike the TV shows and movies where the inmates were held back by reinforced glass windows and had to speak through phones, this penitentiary had a large cafeteria-like room where inmates and their visitors could speak openly across tables. The room was empty, except for Jason and Professor Nelson. Even the guards were asked to stand outside so that no one could listen in on their conversation.

“The Black Stigmata is trying to strengthen its hold on you. Since you and it are separated by distance, its influence will naturally weaken and it knows this. It’s trying to push you into accomplishing the ritual as soon as you can while it still is able to direct your actions.”

“Have you found the nail yet?”

“No, the area where I sent the officer to pick you up has been combed repeatedly, but the nail has yet to be found. We’ve also questioned everyone connected to you and the officer, as well as anyone who was on that road after the encounter. Your family is also safe, they have been questioned on the nail but without letting them know of its actual existence. They know absolutely nothing about the Black Stigmata, and I haven’t seen any signs to suggest one of them has become a new host.”

Jason breathed a sigh of relief, glad to know his family wasn’t in danger. He didn’t want to think about what might happen if someone he cared about became a Host for the nail.

“However, things are far from good. Not only is the disappearance of the nail a very deadly loose end, we have found two corpses that have underwent the ritual, both with their nails already removed. That means that at this time, there are at least FIVE Black Stigmata floating around the area, the fifth being the twin to the one you found. I was hoping the nails would stay dormant for a while. They normally do that, waiting for things to settle down and the BSC to turn their heads, but that is not the case this time. If anything, they’re increasing their aggression.” Nelson then held up a file and laid it out on the table, revealing several pictures from crime scenes, in which people had been raped, murdered, butchered, dissected, and even cannibalized. “Five, possibly even more Hosts could be active at this very moment, and from the number of murders and rapes we’ve also been seeing, the Hosts are trying to fight against them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember that psychotic state I told you about? The one you could enter if exposed to a Black Stigmata in close proximity after the amount of time you’ve spent with it? The length of that state can be extended if the Host tries to defy the nail. The nails themselves cannot perform the ritual for multiplication, even if they possess someone. Their Host must do it under their own free will, even if the nail is forcing them to. If a Host refuses to perform the ritual, then not only will the Black Stigmata become more brutal in the psychological torture that it inflicts, but it also makes do with what it is given and uses the Host to fulfill it’s secondary objective: spread chaos and suffering.

Basically the Host is left with two options: perform the ritual or continue to let the nails torment him/her while their own body is used like a puppet on strings to commit horrible crimes. If the Host doesn’t give into the Black Stigmata’s demands, months can pass by in which they enter the psychotic state over and over again, sometimes killing multiple people each week. The BSC even suspects that many of the most brutal serial killers in history were actually trying to fight back against the control of nails, unknowingly strengthening the hold of the Black Stigmata on their souls and turning them into monsters.

Remember when I said that the BSC sends me updates on every case just in the USA? My email inbox is a mass grave of new bodies every morning.”



Back in the outside world, things weren’t going well for Colleen either. Word had spread that her brother was in jail for supposedly killing a cop and school had become hell. From first impressions, it would seem like all the girls in her school were friends, but almost every nice word was fake and every insult was hidden. It was just like the old saying: guys communicate through insults they don’t mean and girls communicate through compliments they don’t mean. The female population was split up into small cliques, all passive-aggressively snipping at each other.

Colleen got up every morning before dawn to make sure her makeup, hair, and outfit were perfect, just to try and protect her social standing. Any flaw that could be noticed, any mistake that could be called out on would give one of her enemies a chance to tear into her. That was all it took, for one of the girls she hated with all her heart to mention that a lock of hair had come undone or her makeup had smeared and that she now looked like she had just been skull-fucked. With her brother in jail, anyone looking to eliminate an obstacle in becoming the school matriarch would hurl it at her and make it sound like her whole family was crazy.

But it was more than that. She didn’t know what it was, but it seemed like Colleen and everyone around her were always on edge, all with exceptionally thin skin and no patience for anything from anyone. She was getting into fights with her true friends more and more often, she was getting into real open fights with her competitors (a few times, it almost became physical), her grades were dropping, she couldn’t sleep, nothing made her happy anymore, and she just felt like her luck was in the toilet.