Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

LXIII. Lolitaʼs Darkest Doll

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Blood. It slicked up her hands, curling down her arms like drops of water from a faucet; coating every pastel inch of her pasty skin. It clawed itʼs way down to her fingers; oozing, splashing onto her hands, spreading their tentacles along the cracks of her skin.

Lolita watched, sleeping within the storminess of Tonoho Oʼodham, cradled and caressed by the lost souls coiling around her. She watched a young Robin DeMarcus tread through the cells of Tonoho Oʼodham, and watched, her heart pounding in her chest. 

It flowed in arcs, beautiful arcs, Picasso arcs; ebbing away the feeling in her fingers. It blackened her skin until she no longer resembled a human; simply a ghoulish grotesquerie drowning in gore and guts. It stained her prison garb from the Compound, made her sink in copper-scent rivers. Trembling, Robinʼs throat constricted – stinging, sore from her screaming, and sizzling like fires were pouring in her throat.

Tonoho Oʼodham rattled at the memory. Voltaire, aimless, floated towards Lolita, watching alongside her, piecing together the broken dream.

The prison was frosted by earth-shattering frigidity, but also by the scorching sands of time. Within Tonoho O'odham, each wall, brick-by-brick, confined her prisoners, her pain, her sorrow. Robin walked silently, trudging through the walls of the prison, and stared at two men. One with frightening eyes, a lopsided smile that reeked of wickedness, and a mop of greasy red hair. One, meaty and manly, handsomer, yet more perverted. Chained to the cold walls, they laughed manically, and then they cried, cried in violent shrieks, howling to the moon.

The thunder crashed, clapping insidiously – milking thrashing couplets of rain from the cloudʼs dusty rags. The owls screamed and the crickets cried. As she stood in the rain, swallowed by the blackness, Lolita watched as portly drops of rain sucked on her neck – her hair clinging to her skin with sickly sweet scratches, and she trembled within Voltaireʼs grasp.

There was something ungodly here.

Blackness enveloped the sky like materialized plumes of smoke, or the way a demonʼs eyes glowed; the tears of the gods flowing from the obsidian clouds – like ink spilled and diluted from a dingy message bottle. The storm was a banshee, a screaming lady, birds cawing in agony as Robin ran. Her hair was glued her neck, bathing and choking in slimy rain water, thunder growling in all itʼs fury as golden lightning streaked the sky. Her stomach tightened like a steel band smoldering her, and as she panted her lungs shriveled up like gasoline and fire had set it ablaze.

Her chest heaved upwards and downwards as the wind pounded against her, stringing together the warmth of her body and frosting it over like ice. 

"You took from me the one thing in this world that mattered to me," Robin whispered. "My turn: Eat, my son."

Lolita screamed, in pure terror, her body wracked with horror. Salt water stung her eyes, sucking her blood like the silken spider webs that clung onto her bare arms; gnarled in her arm, leeching onto her essence. Voltaire looked on, lifeless, watching the scene unfurl in-front of him.

A ghost – no, not a ghost, a demon – of a baby, emerged from the shadowy darkness: his crown heavily bandaged, his throat kissed with fresh, fleshy scars, eyes scratched out in a bloody black. Robin could not make out his form, could not bare to look, but she watched as the vines that snaked around the men – Lyman and Jorge, her r*pistsʼ bodies – materialized from the walls as the demon baby feasted. The branches glowed like glimmering beacons sent by angels, and then, began slicing through their organs, making the men writhe and wheeze in silken sheens of sanguine blood. Their spines dripped out of their bodies, like tapeworms on hook, blood splashing all of their faces.

She opened the Book, backing into a corner with tears choking her as those men did, constricting her in a swarm of panic and fury. The baby ate with the carnality of an animal, no conscious, just pure bloodlust, and Robin watched, staring at Lolita and Voltaire.

"Dios, perdoname," she kept whispering.

The light grew stronger, blinding the darkness with its rage. It swallowed them whole. As the baby sucked out the souls of those men from their bodies, unrelenting, insatiable in its thirst, and the sands of time bit into its flesh, drawing it into a swirling vortex that bled from the Bookʼs pages. The babyʼs face then came into frame, waxen, pale, not man, and looked to Lolita and Voltaire. The devil wore many faces, but this face, was its most terrifying, most inhumane, most perverted image of the fact humanity was gone.

    Herr Lucifer.

Herr God.

Beware.

   And all that remained was a single page from the Book, woven into a straw doll, the Darkest Doll, forged from naked paper, predatory eyes, and...His face.

Virgil.