Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

LXXXVIII. It Was Always You

7

"We have to go," Scott ground out as he finished his story, slipping his weapons into a burlap sack.

"We have to go – Blake!"

The door slammed open, and a shadow that took the form of a woman entered the room. Blood spurted down her back in long, flowing, beautiful arcs of art – and as she bled, Blake did too. Gasping, wheezing, the sound of a whip cracked in the air – but none revealed itself. Baby's bones littered on the floor, and soon, blood soaked the walls, the floors. Slaughtered women and men howled; their pregnancy bumps and beer bellies splaying open, dead fetuses and intestines between their legs. As the woman commanded the woman's thoughts, churning and spewing them out with ancient Wiccan marriage, Scott dove for Gabriel and chanted again.

"Exorcizamus te, omnis immunde spiritus, omni satanica potestas, omnis..."

The earth shook. The breeze was sharp, replenishing the scars on their skin with fresh, deep cuts, and Hell rose from the rotten floorboards. As hickory vines latched onto the glassy windows, prying apart the Cabin from the inside, Blake reached for Scottʼs .45 and fired at the shadow woman. Again-and-again as she chanted in Latin, lapsing into ancient Wiccan tongues, and making the roots grow more viciously, vehemently, violently. Every time Blake shot her, the bullet would slice through her skin – and get revenge on his. Sloshing organs writhing and wheezing in his body. Summoning a hangmanʼs knife, curved and crooked, she thrust the blade into Blakeʼs chest. His blood splashed his chest, relentlessly, her barbed talons shredding his throat, Scott squeezed Gabriel to his chest and winced with every gurgling, choking croak Blake made.

      Please, please spare my son.

   He tucked his bowie knife underneath him as the woman sauntered towards him. Underneath the slivers of silvery moonlight, the woman in black – the woman who tormented his dreams, who terrorized every waking moment of life – she no longer embodied the face of horror. She wore a particularly dark skin, burned brown by the hot desert sun, her posture regal and sacred in a way. Sacred the way priests that molested children were. Her hair and eyes were inky black – black like orbs, a ravenʼs wing, sleek, seductive like smoke. She had an exotic, yet maternal and sensuous flair to her, a dark aura – and her scent, it made him electric. And every-time he looked her in the eye, there was a pain that seared through him.

Hot, invisible, consuming like a wildfire – and he couldnʼt tear his eyes away from her. She approached him and invoked a terror heʼd never known before, and when she bent down to touch Gabriel, he lunged for her hand and watched as she stopped the bowie knife from hitting her, and slicing into Gabrielʼs poor, fragile body. Coating his chest crimson

"No!" Scott howled. "No!"

The woman in black stared at him sullenly, somberly.

"It always had to be you, my sweet boy," she whispered, caressing his face softly.

"It always had to be you."