Delicious ice cream!... and the water, and the well.
Apr 19, 2018 2:57:46 GMT -5
Dominator / Mortimer and Gerard Angelo like this
Post by Sicko on Apr 19, 2018 2:57:46 GMT -5
"Mariah, why?" he coughed, as he slumped down the side of the steel counter. The coil from the freezer wheezed into life beneath the metal, pumping freon into the box unit, but the outside of the shell was streaked by his handprint swiping down the surface.
"I offered you the price, my love, immortality for pain, madness for love."
Came the voice, haunting, lilting, teasing the monster from it's cage with an ethereal finger tickling right under it's chin.
"But I found someone who embodies those terms more than you can ever imagine in your wildest dreams, Ephrain."
He coughed, choked. Blood dribbled down his massive chin, sluicing through the greasepaint around his mouth, washing it away like a rain.
"You and I are quits, babydoll," said Mariah. In her Tulpa form she stepped over the pool of blood and it didn't even stain the hem of her diaphinous blue dress. Not like it was staining the front of his white ice cream vendor jumpsuit as he bled profusely from the gunshot in his stomach.
His head drooping but still fighting to stay aloft, he looked over at her. Tulpa. Made into the world through ideas and dark magic, trying to be whole. She strode out the back of the ice cream truck, and the man waiting there had hollow, dead eyes, looking at the ground. They were flat black in the dark, and his face was bowed, his brow furrowed as if he was lost in thought. But the shotgun he cradled in both hands was pointed down. Mariah didn't so much step down out of the yawning back door as she floated down to the man, sweeping an arm around him, her fingers playing over his shoulders and his frame in a teasing, lover's finger puppet play.
"You did lay the ground work for this, my love. The pain you fed our Lord was immeasurable, but it wasn't enough. He told you to spread pain, to spread madness, and to do it every week. To hurt people. To cripple, bludgeon, brain."
"Mariah - " he croaked.
But the Tulpa's one, lone staring eye, the one not hidden behind a girlish sheaf of hair, blazed orange-red in rage, her face contorting inhumanly. "BUT YOU DIDN'T!"
"You let it die down! You let our influence wane. Soon the horror that was spreading in our cul-de-sac was just forgotten dreams, and some lingering influence."
"If you wanted to live forever, to live in immortality with me, you had to pay the bloodprice. THEY, had to pay the bloodprice."
"Now he will," said George Turner in a stupified haze. "Pay the bloodprice."
Tulpa Mariah pinched his cheek between thumb and forefinger, wiggling a jowl like a flap, "That's mommy's good boy, yes, bleed him out. Bleed him piece by piece. He will feed Lord Moloch's blood price, and the power will be lent to me, Georgie baby..."
She looked wicked, and she pushed the hair back from over her eye, exposing the horrible burns that covered the side of her face. "Me... and you, forever..."
"Forever," George Turner's catatonic shell echoed, and Mariah pushed off, floating away...
The glint of the moonlight filtering into the back of the ice cream truck played over the muzzle of the shotgun, darkened as it poked it's head into the cab of the ice cream truck.
By the time he had fully entered the back, the desert sky was split with screams.
Some miles away from the ice cream truck parked out on a lone stretch of road in the Arizona desert night, parked by the curb just down the street from a little cul-de-sac named Lexington Terrace. He had just been inside the split-level duplex, a two-story house divided for two occupants that had, for weeks, stood vacant. He had been too late. He was months too late, in fact. He wished with a layer of sadness and self-recrimination that he had thought to warn Nora Turner. He didn't even make the connections with the sick case he had come chasing until after the fact, but it all added up. George Turner's screaming madness fit, catatonic fugue state, and sudden awakening. Just like the incident at Hall C.
Every time he tried to put it out of his mind it was drawn back, against his will. The night Ephrain Ortiz had left Hall C.
He had left the butchered body behind, a brutally dismembered corpse. And no sooner had George Turner been discharged from the hospital, the same one he had checked in on what felt like months ago, and George Turner had done the unthinkable... the unspeakable.
The left side of the duplex was still taped off with yellow tape. He hadn't braved over there. He was afraid he still might find... pieces of Nora Turner.
Instead, he went to the other side. He creeped around by the bushes, feeling less like the confident, caring young psych that entered the halls of Springdale and more like a trespasser of some dark abode, a charlatan entering an unholy dark ritualistic place.
He put his hands at the bottom of the garage door, and he pulled up. With the rattle of steel shutters, it moved upward.
He started in surprise, but braved onward. He had come this far, at least.
He crept in, shining a pen sized light around. He saw oil spots and heavy tire marks where a rattling, dilapidated old truck might have sat.
Once he had finally heard about Nora's brutal dismemberment and George's disappearance into the wind he had begun surveillance. But being the winter months, the ice cream truck lay dormant, and the house at the end of the lane may as well have been abandoned. The local kids shied away from it, telling ridiculous stories about the ice cream truck having teeth. The clown never made an appearance again, either. It was as if he was hibernating. As if the giant clown had crawled into the ice cream truck and hibernated like a butterfly in imago, perhaps one day to burst into new and horrible life and fly. Or perhaps Ephrain really and truly was gone.
If he had wintered here in all that time, the garage didn't show it.
He peered at the dingy room. There were tools strewn on a work bench and backstop, greasy, disused tools. And a wall covered in newspaper clippings.
His stomach churned to look at them. Ephrain had been active for much longer than he thought, a decade before he had come into his care. More.
So how did this fit? How did the dismembered bodies of Mariah Bamford and Nora Turner, ripped if not cut to pieces by two separate men in the same way connect?
The report he had read said that George had screamed about finding a body, pieced together out of parts, when he had investigated. And it had driven him mad. But there was no body parts found on the premises...
How did it all fit?
As errantly and raggedly as the pieces of Mariah and Nora, he sighed, massaging his temples. He clicked off the light.
And when he turned, he found himself staring, face to face, with a pale, ghoulish, nightmare figure of mind-bending unreality. She looked like doll parts sewn back into a whole. Her jaw bone was sewn back to her top mandible. Her arms, stitched, were badly put on, so that they were falling apart. But she stood, like a broken doll, but she stood. And he shook his head, warding off the scream.
"This is the water." The figure that he identified as the corpse, mutilated yet pieced back together by some insane hand, the rotting corpse of Nora Turner. "And this is the well."
He screamed. He couldn't help it. The voice was madness personified. It was gravel and grass dug from a grave forcing it's way through necrotic vocal chords. It was insistent, terse verbiage being spoken by baleful, hateful, reanimated eyes. "This is the water. And this is the well."
Daniel Shomron, panicking, knocked over the workbench. A gas lantern hit the ground, spraying glass, and filling the room with the smell of kerosene. There was another voice.
"This is the water." said another voice, this one pitched to sound like an estimation of a younger voice, but no less fear inducing. "And this is the well."
The boy was dismembered, too. Chopped up, and stitched back together. He lived despite a hole in his head the size of a softball, an obvious gun accident. "This is the water. And this is the well."
"This is the water. And this is the well."
"This is the water. And this is the well."
They both repeated, moving around him. At the touch of their feet, the kerosene from the broken lantern soaking in the floor curved around in a curtain, an arc of fire, and the harshly whispering patchwork people stood in the flames. "This is the well spring.
This is the pain.
This is the immortality."
The garage door was shuttered tight, no longer budging an inch, no longer moving up on it's track and he scrabbled against it, nails ripping out as he clawed against the sheet metal, yelling until his throat was hoarse.
"This is the water. This is the well spring." Gargled the mangled, dead form of Nora Turner. "This is living forever."
"I offered you the price, my love, immortality for pain, madness for love."
Came the voice, haunting, lilting, teasing the monster from it's cage with an ethereal finger tickling right under it's chin.
"But I found someone who embodies those terms more than you can ever imagine in your wildest dreams, Ephrain."
He coughed, choked. Blood dribbled down his massive chin, sluicing through the greasepaint around his mouth, washing it away like a rain.
"You and I are quits, babydoll," said Mariah. In her Tulpa form she stepped over the pool of blood and it didn't even stain the hem of her diaphinous blue dress. Not like it was staining the front of his white ice cream vendor jumpsuit as he bled profusely from the gunshot in his stomach.
His head drooping but still fighting to stay aloft, he looked over at her. Tulpa. Made into the world through ideas and dark magic, trying to be whole. She strode out the back of the ice cream truck, and the man waiting there had hollow, dead eyes, looking at the ground. They were flat black in the dark, and his face was bowed, his brow furrowed as if he was lost in thought. But the shotgun he cradled in both hands was pointed down. Mariah didn't so much step down out of the yawning back door as she floated down to the man, sweeping an arm around him, her fingers playing over his shoulders and his frame in a teasing, lover's finger puppet play.
"You did lay the ground work for this, my love. The pain you fed our Lord was immeasurable, but it wasn't enough. He told you to spread pain, to spread madness, and to do it every week. To hurt people. To cripple, bludgeon, brain."
"Mariah - " he croaked.
But the Tulpa's one, lone staring eye, the one not hidden behind a girlish sheaf of hair, blazed orange-red in rage, her face contorting inhumanly. "BUT YOU DIDN'T!"
"You let it die down! You let our influence wane. Soon the horror that was spreading in our cul-de-sac was just forgotten dreams, and some lingering influence."
"If you wanted to live forever, to live in immortality with me, you had to pay the bloodprice. THEY, had to pay the bloodprice."
"Now he will," said George Turner in a stupified haze. "Pay the bloodprice."
Tulpa Mariah pinched his cheek between thumb and forefinger, wiggling a jowl like a flap, "That's mommy's good boy, yes, bleed him out. Bleed him piece by piece. He will feed Lord Moloch's blood price, and the power will be lent to me, Georgie baby..."
She looked wicked, and she pushed the hair back from over her eye, exposing the horrible burns that covered the side of her face. "Me... and you, forever..."
"Forever," George Turner's catatonic shell echoed, and Mariah pushed off, floating away...
The glint of the moonlight filtering into the back of the ice cream truck played over the muzzle of the shotgun, darkened as it poked it's head into the cab of the ice cream truck.
By the time he had fully entered the back, the desert sky was split with screams.
Some miles away from the ice cream truck parked out on a lone stretch of road in the Arizona desert night, parked by the curb just down the street from a little cul-de-sac named Lexington Terrace. He had just been inside the split-level duplex, a two-story house divided for two occupants that had, for weeks, stood vacant. He had been too late. He was months too late, in fact. He wished with a layer of sadness and self-recrimination that he had thought to warn Nora Turner. He didn't even make the connections with the sick case he had come chasing until after the fact, but it all added up. George Turner's screaming madness fit, catatonic fugue state, and sudden awakening. Just like the incident at Hall C.
Every time he tried to put it out of his mind it was drawn back, against his will. The night Ephrain Ortiz had left Hall C.
He had left the butchered body behind, a brutally dismembered corpse. And no sooner had George Turner been discharged from the hospital, the same one he had checked in on what felt like months ago, and George Turner had done the unthinkable... the unspeakable.
The left side of the duplex was still taped off with yellow tape. He hadn't braved over there. He was afraid he still might find... pieces of Nora Turner.
Instead, he went to the other side. He creeped around by the bushes, feeling less like the confident, caring young psych that entered the halls of Springdale and more like a trespasser of some dark abode, a charlatan entering an unholy dark ritualistic place.
He put his hands at the bottom of the garage door, and he pulled up. With the rattle of steel shutters, it moved upward.
He started in surprise, but braved onward. He had come this far, at least.
He crept in, shining a pen sized light around. He saw oil spots and heavy tire marks where a rattling, dilapidated old truck might have sat.
Once he had finally heard about Nora's brutal dismemberment and George's disappearance into the wind he had begun surveillance. But being the winter months, the ice cream truck lay dormant, and the house at the end of the lane may as well have been abandoned. The local kids shied away from it, telling ridiculous stories about the ice cream truck having teeth. The clown never made an appearance again, either. It was as if he was hibernating. As if the giant clown had crawled into the ice cream truck and hibernated like a butterfly in imago, perhaps one day to burst into new and horrible life and fly. Or perhaps Ephrain really and truly was gone.
If he had wintered here in all that time, the garage didn't show it.
He peered at the dingy room. There were tools strewn on a work bench and backstop, greasy, disused tools. And a wall covered in newspaper clippings.
His stomach churned to look at them. Ephrain had been active for much longer than he thought, a decade before he had come into his care. More.
So how did this fit? How did the dismembered bodies of Mariah Bamford and Nora Turner, ripped if not cut to pieces by two separate men in the same way connect?
The report he had read said that George had screamed about finding a body, pieced together out of parts, when he had investigated. And it had driven him mad. But there was no body parts found on the premises...
How did it all fit?
As errantly and raggedly as the pieces of Mariah and Nora, he sighed, massaging his temples. He clicked off the light.
And when he turned, he found himself staring, face to face, with a pale, ghoulish, nightmare figure of mind-bending unreality. She looked like doll parts sewn back into a whole. Her jaw bone was sewn back to her top mandible. Her arms, stitched, were badly put on, so that they were falling apart. But she stood, like a broken doll, but she stood. And he shook his head, warding off the scream.
"This is the water." The figure that he identified as the corpse, mutilated yet pieced back together by some insane hand, the rotting corpse of Nora Turner. "And this is the well."
He screamed. He couldn't help it. The voice was madness personified. It was gravel and grass dug from a grave forcing it's way through necrotic vocal chords. It was insistent, terse verbiage being spoken by baleful, hateful, reanimated eyes. "This is the water. And this is the well."
Daniel Shomron, panicking, knocked over the workbench. A gas lantern hit the ground, spraying glass, and filling the room with the smell of kerosene. There was another voice.
"This is the water." said another voice, this one pitched to sound like an estimation of a younger voice, but no less fear inducing. "And this is the well."
The boy was dismembered, too. Chopped up, and stitched back together. He lived despite a hole in his head the size of a softball, an obvious gun accident. "This is the water. And this is the well."
"This is the water. And this is the well."
"This is the water. And this is the well."
They both repeated, moving around him. At the touch of their feet, the kerosene from the broken lantern soaking in the floor curved around in a curtain, an arc of fire, and the harshly whispering patchwork people stood in the flames. "This is the well spring.
This is the pain.
This is the immortality."
The garage door was shuttered tight, no longer budging an inch, no longer moving up on it's track and he scrabbled against it, nails ripping out as he clawed against the sheet metal, yelling until his throat was hoarse.
"This is the water. This is the well spring." Gargled the mangled, dead form of Nora Turner. "This is living forever."
