A Night in Calamity Wood
By Ben Norman
Prologue.
She was born screaming.
Birth, just like the life to follow it, is rarely a dignified or quiet affair. Thrust from the nurturing dark of nothingness into the blinding whirlwind of reality, newborns are met with an inescapable explosion of emotional processing that must be released. So they cry and they whine. They shout to the heavens to express their fear and confusion. They curse all who can hear them for the dreadful inconvenience of being brought into the world.
But she was not whining. Nor crying. She was screaming. She was screaming in absolute agony.
She was blind and she was deaf, so maddening insufferable pain was her first sensation; her first taste of the splendors of earth. Her entire body felt beaten and bruised. Worse than that, she felt like she had been butchered. Slashed. Torn apart. Like a million wounds had opened and shut themselves all over her. She felt like a broken porcelain doll clumsily glued back together. Flares of pain washed over her like a pulsing current, and following that pain led her to discover each of her limbs in turn. Her fingers and toes yearned to stretch and spread in all directions, but they were bound, strapped in something, and constrained. Her head was tightly wrapped and could barely tilt from side to side.
Like one of those silly mummies from the Museum…
What was that? What were those words that drifted across her mind? What were… She was struck by another explosion of pain, this time from behind her eyes. Like a fiery knot between her ears, the concussive pounding made her teeth grind and her eyes bulge. She saw hazy light come into focus somewhere far away. Then she began to see other things.
A night on the patio with mother… The swaying of the rocking chair…
Sitting in her lap when I was a babe… Am I not a babe now?
A blinding flash far off.
Teasing with him, the brutish oaf… Look at the way he blushes…
Could he be the one… Others to consider…
Another flash, this time closer.
Get away from me! Get away from her! The girl runs… I remain…
Four men… Four glistening blades… All about me…
Hacking… Slashing… Tearing…
They… Murdered… Me…
How do I know these words…
The light was on her now, all around her. The darkness literally lifted from her face and she felt the first kisses of cold damp air on her brow. All about were murky, colorless images blurring together and wobbling incoherently. Slowly, shapes began to align and come into focus. She was looking up, lying flat against some elevated surface. Above her was a man, looming over her and holding the bandage he had just removed from her eyes. He was young and well-groomed, with jet black hair slicked smoothly back on his head. He was however undeniably sickly in his expression, carrying the furrowed brow and nervous disposition of a tortured poet or long suffering artist. There was an unmistakable blend of horror and awe beaming from his quivering eyes as he beheld her. In a shaky and remorseful tone he exclaimed:
"She's alive! Alive!"
He reached down to something past her point of view, and suddenly she was spinning around and rising upwards. She was on a platform… a gurney. Another word. It locked into place with her upright, almost as if she were on her feet. The straps on her wrist, waist, and ankles kept her held securely in place. All about her were flashing lights and dripping water. There were sparkles and pools, rays and flashes. Strange devices hummed and illuminated staticky animated bursts of color. The only things that were solitary and stationary enough for her to focus on were the two men that stood before her. The dark-haired one was slowly backing away from her with his hands raised defensively. The other man was much older and grayer, with a wiry head of hair that sprang in all directions. His weathered crow-like face was tightening with excitement into a bare-toothed grin, and his eyes grew almost comically large as they locked contact with hers. He held his downturned palms outward like a minister about to baptize a newborn and proclaimed in biblical fashion:
"The Bride of Frankenstein!"
The other man turned sharply back towards him. "I've had enough of your rancid sense of humor, Septimus. My name has seen enough slander thanks to this incident. I'll have no further ties of any variety with that… thing." He gestured back to her with a noticeable sneer. "The job is done and so is my part in the whole affair." The man turned to walk away but stopped when his older compatriot delicately placed the fingertips of his right hand on the young man's collarbone.
"Victor, my lad… I implore you to trust in the wisdom my years of work in the field has granted me. You're in the private sector now. You go… where the money tells you to go."
"We were scientists once, you and I," cried the young man passionately. "We dealt within the laws of the universe! I wanted to cure death, not mire my hands in blasphemy. Medicine! This was supposed to be about medicine, for the love of God! This was supposed to be about saving lives, not creating abominations of black magic like this poor damned creature!" His shaking hands fluttered furiously back towards her.
"Don't go acting like that beast of yours is some divine accomplishment, Victor. Our methods may come from… different fields of study, but that doesn't undersell what a triumph our girl is. Just look at her!" The older man rapidly strutted over and peeled another layer of membranous cloth from her face. Cold night air brushed her nose and lips and cheeks for the first time. It was almost like relief.
The younger man looked like he may wretch. Sweat burst from his brow and he turned away as a man from a bloodbath. "No! I cannot look upon that horrible face! Not knowing as I do what lies beneath it!" He stormed off down a flight of stairs that descended into the pitch black maw of a tunnel beneath. The older man turned startedly and gave chase, and the two quickly dissapeared into the shadows. She heard the echoing cries of their heated debate as they drifted further and farther away from her. "If it's saving lives you're so concerned with, young Frankenstein, may it be of some comfort that in pleasing our benefactor you will most certainly be saving our own…"
Throughout their entire diatribe she had been pleading in a desperate murmur. It was all she had the strength to muster. Either they never heard her pained pleas or they simply disregarded them. All around her the strange lights and sounds hummed down to a close, and she was left alone, strapped to the table, with nothing but the dripping of rainwater through the stone ceiling to respond to her cries. She was scared, and confused, and even in the mildewy darkness of this haunted place, wherever it may be, her vision still danced with that strange kaleidoscope of images from… the past? Her past? She didn't know who she was, so how very well might she recognize herself? She felt tears stream down her face, and her wails turned into prolonged moans that echoed all around her. When she heard that mocking reverberation she shuddered at the horrible sound. Was that really her? She hushed herself and soon enough the only echoes were the short bursts of her sniffling crying.
That was when a voice responded from out of the darkness. It was a moan as unintelligible and wordless as her own, but it was deep as a canyon and boomed like a falling tree. The long, inhuman "Aaaauuuuuuwwwwww…" was a combination of erupting volcano and roaring animal. There was a massive impact on the floor ten feet away from her, like someone had dropped a cinderblock upon the stone, then followed it with another. Footsteps. Two colossal footsteps as some impossible large thing entered into the dark room behind her. Her cries ceased immediately, and she felt a hollow pain in her chest as she took in a hundred sharp, panicked breaths. BOOM BOOM the footsteps continued, rattling the floor and sending vibrations along the metal slab she was frozen against. She shook and strained, but the bonds would not yield. Two more footsteps. A gust of horse breath rolled over the right side of her face, powerful and voluminous. Even affixed as she was on the huge slab, this thing stood far above her. She couldn't bring herself to turn towards it. She felt her chest seize and her lungs stretch to burst, but was too terrified to release the scream that had been congesting there.
The Monster paced around the slab before her. What little light remained in the room was blocked entirely by his massive frame. Her lips trembled as she took in what few details she could make out. She saw stitches stretched over open wounds, metal clamps dug into green rot-covered flesh, and two lifeless eyes blinking into lustfull awareness as they took in her shape and form. His slowly releasing breath solidified into a longing, pleading moan as his hands rose before her. Her head banged against the slab as she uselessly tried to retreat. His fingers were gnarled and far too long, ending in several bloody stubs where the fingernails had been broken away. The knuckles were bruised and bloody as well. These were not gentle hands. As the cold, damp, sandpaper touch of those fingers scratched along her cheeks she gagged as the horrible scream that so needed to erupt caught in her throat. Her entire body squirmed in disgust and terror as those malformed fingers crawled along her jaw and her ears to caress each side of her head. And, as the yellow-toothed noseless face of her lover drew in for a yearning embrace, that wretched shrill scream finally burst forth from her and cried across an empty heaven where none paid any heed.
She's been screaming ever since.