Hangman's Noose
Author's Note: Enjoy the poem and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of the House of the Dead series.
Summary:
A surrealist poem based on the resurrected Hangedman's advent, set during The House of the Dead: Scarlet Dawn.
The heavens were an uncouth sea of black clouds clawing spider veins into the stratosphere like the Gothic steeples that spiked high from the mansion grounds. Leaves wafting in the freezing night air whipped up shadows that devoured ancient hewn stone and palisade, the fresh scent of mausoleum soil seen through hollowed sockets. A gravedigger's paradise, hidden away at the unsurmountable end of all hope, pierced through by an eastern thorn. The clang of metal brought to edifice, downed shrieks of a dying steel bird. Striking a dual chord. It outlasts time in moratorium.
On coriaceous pockmarked wings that beat giant gust-cries, the demon-beast held itself aloft like a dark pendulum against the shrivelled sky. To and fro it rocked, a ragdoll's curse on the wind, perpetually moving, yet also still as death. Malformed skull crushed beneath infrared goggled blindness. Beneath the eerie white glow of the dread'd thunder-flagellated, flesh eater's moon, the chittering fangs of fiftyfold terrors assaulting human sleep.
The taste of the executioner's arch as it descends and sinks a hellmouth to earth uncharitable. The rake of spiny five-fingered witchery on unwilling skin. A gargoyle's grimace, binding and skeletal. Blood-striped, bisected at the knees. Talon to torch. The moonmist gathers. It will not draw back from the flame-licked fur of the lycan-ghast who wields it. Desperation is the tonic of the unliving. Hunger unceasing. Plague everlasting.
It was forty-one, born twice.
I cannot dream, for I am awake. What is it to be awake, but to dream?
So cold, the thump in the dark.