Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

CV. Mommy Knows Best

21
PRINCE MANOR
Robin
Giovanniʼs Keep
Vinci, Louisiana
October 31st, 2014
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To enter the Keep was to be skinned alive by darkness; to be flayed by madness. To feel the sharp teeth of insects cut deep into your eyes and to feel the dark, damned things of the night rip the flesh from your bones. It was the belly of the Princely beast, chalk full of piss and shit, and in the pitch-blackness, the wind howled, the creatures under the earth hissed in the dampness, and arachnid demi-humans snarled as they clung to the walls, their eyes a haunting white as they suspended themselves from their large, cannibalistic webs. Oxygen was a suffocating noose in the Keep, the dark was absolute – like the doors studded with iron and insects in a sargasso sea of mold – and the tides of black creatures, small as bugs, were chokingly overwhelming.

To enter the Keep was to enter the seventh circle of hell: to die by the pain and fury of the preternatural prison, by the force a thousand explosive suns.

And for Robin, well, that slogan was her goddamn bumper sticker.

Peeling from the shadows, Robin watched as the Keep drank in the depths of the room and listened for piss cascading towards the floor. The violent, bloodthirsty, creatures were asleep for the night – the desiccated remains of cannibalistic delights scattered around the Keep in slick bloody heaps – and to that, she strolled. When she reached the cell she wanted, cell number 008B smeared on every door to the right and left of her, she heard it – the soft whisper, the gentle warning:

When the rose whispers to you, run.

To enter the Keep was to be skinned alive by darkness; to be flayed by madness, she had said. But in the darkness, in the madness, there were no rules. No entrapments, no scheming. Just pure, animalistic intention. The Orderʼs courtiers outside the Keepʼs walls were mice she could stomp on, the bold men of the Dragonsguard ants she could eat with her steeled teeth, and she was hungry with a Macbethian hunger. A hunger that made her craving for meat pumping deeply in her veins, a hunger that harbored seas of blood in her thunderous stomach. In the depths of cell 008B, she was in a nude, drunken stupor. The prisoner. Blood ran down her creamy thighs with a freeness, with an insistence that knew no bounds, and as Robin locked the door, a faint whisper of decay crept inside her. The cell was foul, caked in urine and feces just like the halls were, and the prisoner was chained to the wall where she crouched on her hind legs, mouth incarcerated in a feverish slew of giggles. She sang with a giggle, harking with a newfound, maddening vitriole, and Robin listened. Waiting, watching:

Times are gettinʼ hard the noo
Yer daddys singinʼ on the brew
Yer Mammysʼ still got a penny or two
Tae buy some Coulterʼs Candy

Poor wee Jennieʼs lookinʼ awfuʼ thin
A rickle of banes kivvered oʼer wiʼ skin
Noo sheʼs gettinʼ a wee double chin
From sookinʼ on Coulterʼs Candy

Decarabia giggled. Mascara streaked her face, curling against her skin and caking it in sweat dirt, and as her eyes bulged – flailing like a bugs eyes leeching onto the essence of the blood – as her fingers struggled against the strain of the iron chains. They were pure iron, forged from the holy fires of Jerusalem, and as she struggled, her skin blackened like her eyes. Luciferʼs right hand, a hailed demon marquess, was decaying. Rotting into nothing. To Robin, the irony behind it all was absolutely delicious, and with a devilish smirk, her eyes lit up.