FALLEN in TO KNOW THE POWER OF DARKNESS

I paused before following the disordered orderly through the open doorway.

"Now I shall enjoy myself full measure."

"Wh-What are you going to do?," whispered Clover.

I arched an eyebrow. "I shall tutor him and his ilk as I did Guy de Maupassant."

"You knew him?"

I smiled, and Clover shuddered as her eyes met mine.

"Indeed. And he knew me. Though the encounter was not to his liking."

I smiled at the memory. "What he saw drove him quite mad. He tried to slit his throat to keep from seeing those visions endlessly repeated in his fevered brain. But I was merciful."

"H-How?"

"I let him die a year and a half later."

Clover started to edge back from me, but I snared her arm. "Come. Let us hear what lies locust tell."

"I don't understand."

"Nature does not require that her victims understand their fate."

"Don't make me. Please!"

I easily dragged her after me. After all, she was but flesh. I turned back and showed her all my needle teeth.

"Only she who walks the country road by night knows the power of darkness."

"Fallen!"

"Too true."

She squirmed helplessly in my arms as I followed the shivering orderly through the open doorway. I clamped a tight hand over her mouth. Alerted these tormentors of the helpless would force me to end my fun much too quickly.

Clover went death still as the metal door hissed closed behind us. I smiled when I spied the interior. The angular starting gate of a sprawling maze of corridors. Rats. They thought of humans as rats. How insulting to rats.

The metal dull. The stench fetid. Decaying flesh. Stagnant sewers. Stale air of the tomb.

The group of humans were intelligently scared witless.

But not as addled as the orderly who approached the tall, angular man in the lab coat, twitching his eyebrows furiously. The orderly jerked his arms about as if regressing to another stage of life. His clicks and clucks were unnerving the already unsettled humans. The doctor in the lab coat was past unsettled all the way to furious.

"Smitz. Smitz! Remember your station. English. English!"

The three other orderlys looked at one another, their own eyebrows convulsing as if about to tear themselves from their moorings. I smiled. One so likes to see one's efforts appreciated.

Smitz was beside him. Literally. He twitched in place as if cursed to dance to the music of the damned eternally. The clicks were mere husks now.

The doctor gave up and wetly gurgled his own series of rasping clicks. The humans stepped back as one unit. But the alien words seemed to help the orderly gather a wit or two.

"A-Abberations, Doctor. Abberations!"

"Talk sense, Smitz!"

Smitz shuddered in a grotesque fashion, his knees rubbing together as if for comfort, not unlike some giant preying mantis. "Man-Manifistations of psychic presence. Insane psychic presenses!"

The doctor's eyebrows did the impossible and moved sideways. "Psychic phenomena are the delusions of hu ...."

He bent his neck so sharply mine hurt just seeing him do it. " ... delusions of inmates like those here we study."

"Study?," grunted the tallest female among the patients.

Hair cut like a boy, body held in what she felt a mannish pose. Yet her genes betrayed her, and the effect was one of childish exaggeration.

"You're supposed to be helping us, Usher."

Unblinking eyes studied her remotely. "Are we? And that is Doctor Usher, Sydney."

A feral cherub of a young man to her right whispered, "What are you doing, trying to get him mad? Are you nuts?"

Sydney smirked, "Depends who you ask."

Smitz jerked in spasms. "No! I felt it. It is out there."

Usher moved his jaws sideways as if they were mandibles. "Felt what?"

"C-Contagion."

The doctor finally lost patience with Smitz and motioned with his eyebrows to a short, bulky orderly. "Chizsene, take this ... this reject to the larvae."

"No! Not that. Not that!"

Chizsene was not to be denied. And Smitz in his current state was no match for him. Though I will give him this, he tried. Chizsene dragged his throttled charge right past me. I could see the distaste and fear in the short orderly. I smiled. It would seem he feared contagion. So be it. His fear had pronounced his own judgement.

I leaned forward, drawing in his fear and breathed it back upon him fourfold. I smiled wide. Best to layer this cake.

I drew forth the words etched on the tomb of Edward the Black Prince. Cursed wretch that he had been. Though, truth to tell, since 1376, he had done nary a crime in all of Albion. Not surprising since when you are dead, you are quiet a long time.

As Chizsene looked his fear of contagion at Smitz, I murmured in his ear,

"Behold and see as you pass by

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so soon you will be.

Prepare for that and follow me."

His eyes went wild wide as he passed. His chirp to the door barely audible. It hissed open. Chizsene and his charge stumbled through. The door slammed closed.

I whispered to the unseen mechanisms, "Rust of ages."

No longer would that door open. The contagion of fear and madness would now spread throughout the rest of the staff outside this chamber --

and to the larvae, whatever manner of creatures they might be.

And these few that remained? I smiled cold. They were mine.
***
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