DESECRATION DESTROYED: MISTRESS OF THE MOSQUITOES
By Quillon42
Callously returning to the seemingly impenetrable bush again were Jack and Harry so many months later, the duo delving into an apparent jungle to rival the wilderness of Guadalcanal which each barely survived as fellow soldiers the better part of a century prior. Though they were here again in this American countryside as civilians for camping and not as cadets in cadence, they still felt more than wearied by the atmosphere, as old and wizened as their minds were now.
Of course, the same could not be said for the remainder of the constitution of each, as thanks to the rejuvenating jolt provided by the Jacarunda mixture that Harry's latent love Lucille had made for all three of them…three, that was, amidst the two couples that these codgers had been in total. For sure, there had been a more than frustrating fourth wheel amongst them, a shrew so shrewd and shrill by the handle of Cynthia who had driven her husband Jack to drink throughout almost the entirety of their miserable marriage, and who had been excluded against her will from the same youth-renewing treatment the trio otherwise had undergone.
With their youth and strength so replenished, in fact, it wasn't any difficulty for Jack and Harry and Lucille to then overpower the suckiest Cynthia and force-feed her, in this emphatically alternate version of the Cryptic Tale, an elixir adulterated with the contents of her husband's venerable vodka bottle such that she was cast to dust in a span of seconds. Cannily the three also apportioned some of that compromised potion to the haggard hound chained nearby, just to put him out of his misery also.
Speaking of chains, Jack was enormously elated that she who shackled him to the better part of a century of unutterable emasculation was so summarily shunted out of his thirties-returned life. For Harry, it was an easy rationalization to posit that these transactions rescued his longtime fellow veteran, just as the man had saved him so handily on the battlefield those seeming billions of days ago. And Lucille, well, she just wanted so badly to experience that unusual rejuvenation that others of her clan had undergone in similar rituals, regardless of any untoward collateral costs.
Terrific was this triumph and it looked like it could open the door to related opportunities. There were, undoubtedly, so many widows and widowers that Jack, Harry, and Lucille each knew who jealousy kept many valuable trinkets and wealth otherwise in their homes…perhaps they could use a hint of boozed voodoo to usher them along into the next world. Then the three could obtain possession over such treasures…for the sake of posterity, to honor the memory of the tragically passed, of course.
Honestly it appeared to be an occasion for festivity and celebration now that so many decades had seceded for these three. Nothing could drag any of them back to becoming the embittered elderly entities that they were in merely the days preceding.
Really no thing could do so…
But it wasn't the case here that no one could.
As with so many other heady harkenings heralded by the editors of EC Comics (who originally published revolting rags like Tales From The Crypt and The Vault Of Horror in print), now the two once-old men came back to these sticks in which they so sadistically shunted Cynthia out of her thankless existence…again to honor the memory of the tragically passed. Lucille went on ahead of them in an effort to manufacture more of the purest Jacarunda Juice that she could from the remains of Harry's first wife, just as she had done those twelve months preceding.
While Harry and Jack jaunted huffingly along herein each could not help but become somewhat more than perturbed at the number of times they had to raise a hand, as young and as smooth as it felt now, to a neck with skin just as supple and unwrinkled. Certainly it seemed that the airborne blood-gorging vermin were all the more vicious than they were months back…perhaps it was because old Cindy wasn't around this time to connect with her own kind and take the brunt of it all.
But seriously, it was as the nubile nonagenarians had reached the clearing where both Harry's former spouse Emma as well as Cynthia had both been buried, when
[BZZZZZZZZZZTTTTT]
"Ghaaag! These…pests have become a real pain in the ass this season, I'll tell you what!"
"I know, I know, Jack…let's just swat our way through it and get to Lucy…she's stirrin' up our fluid fortune as we speak—just seein' that cauldron again'll probably take another twenty years off your life, I'd say."
"I'd just like to have the twenty thousand insects taken off of me…"
Ahead indeed there was a figure of finest cocoa flesh, now taking a ladle to the container before her. Harry was pleased to be able to catch up with Lucille, after what felt like weeks of hiking…
…yet his face plummeted utterly upon noticing that the woman before him had in fact been the wife that was, and not the one who is.
Waving away another several aerial arthropods milling around his mouth, Harry:
"Ehh…Ehh…
"Emma?!"
At this the female figure took a step to the side, and it was then that the man made eye contact at last with his Lucille…
…He staring at lightless and slowly but surely aging irises occupying steadily-withering sockets out of a face belonging to a continuously-emaciating human shape supine on the uncultivated grass.
"You thought the Jacarunda had only worked for three…that a fourth would be shut out…
"Turns out that the concoction came out well for a quartet of us after all."
Unbelievably, there she was, the erstwhile wife of Harold herself, not as any kind of undead entity but rather just as jubilant and as fresh as her flesh had been on the day she had passed…
…on the day Harry had passed her on anyway, that is.
Now the same ex-soldier was stifled under so much shock and consternation as he continued to stare at she who once had been the love of his life…before he'd decided to undergo what he felt in his mind was an appropriate upgrade, that was.
"I don't…I don't get it…"
"What's there to not get, Harry? The hell you think you expected when you implanted those…weeds into my skull? You really think something so powerfully supernatural would only affect this side of the grave?"
She measured the man with rage-routed pupils, then pressed on. "I mean, sure…it took me somewhat longer to come around here, having been dead, or should I honestly say, done in all this time…but it all did kick in for me as well, given a bit of a spell longer. For whatever reason, though, I'm unable to leave these grounds despite my ostensible restoration…which is why I'm so overjoyed to have you and your friend…and your latest wife as well…all come out to visit me."
Harry's attention again returned to Lucille, she on her back and staring emptily out at him. It was this time that he noted the massing of so many of those blood-siphoning winged bugs upon her.
"Given you were always so much more of a man of action, Harry, I can't imagine you ever took the time to read Lord Of The Flies by Golding. Well…I guess you could say I'm the female counterpart to that bastardly Beelzebub…given how I've gifted your recent spouse with such a momentous amount of mosquitoes. And how I'm just about to visit the same plague upon you both."
Staggering forward now upon his already beginning to feel another squadron of skeeters upon him in fact was Jack now. "But I never had any kind of beef with you, lady! Unless you're also doing this for Cynthia's sake…"
"Now why would I Jacarunda's jackass about that carping full-of-herself fishwife?" Emma snorted derisively at the idea. "That's the one thing I agree with you all on, that she got what she deserved. Hell, I'm glad she went out first…saved me any sort of trouble on doing her myself.
"No, I have an issue with all of you who capitalized off my carcass…and now, even if only for a fleeting instant, you and I are gonna trade places on that…just as Lucille here traded with me."
Horribly the buzzing of the ever-congregating creatures grew louder and louder as they stormed around the men, each misery-inducing minibeast setting penetrating proboscis to skin posthaste.
"Don't worry if you can't stand the sight or the idea of having all the blood taken from you, though," continued the former cadaver that was Emma. "I've commanded them only to drain the essence of the Jacarunda extract itself from your cells…just as I did with Lucille."
In fact each man began to feel that now…the sensation of something potent departing from him in droplets…and then the consequent feeling of aging, though likewise as a kind of trickle and not a flood, nothing like the skeleton-smashing crush toward spontaneous decomposition that Cynthia here had experienced. Yea, Jack and Harry felt forty coming on one minute…then a quarter hour later it was forty-one…then fifteen minutes passed and forty-two.
"I want you both to know, atom by atom, how the desecration of my unjustly-occasioned-in-the-first-place grave had felt to me…and how it had left me."
And in the hours that followed, the completely enervated men fell to their feet before the once-wronged woman, Harry in particular going down on his knees for the first time since all those years ago that he proposed to an Emma so ebullient and loving and joyful…only in this present instance, it made one of them as to who was feeling any pleasure.
Then about a third of a day's time later, when the mobs of mosquitoes had reduced the two military men to so much ancient mincemeat, Emma tiredly crept back to the place where she had been resting in the grass for so long beforehand.
Never did the lady want to become young again. It was more than enough to exact payment from her former spouse here, an alimony of aging agony. She sighed with relief in fact as she waved her hands and permitted the pests to come and drain her next.
