A Skull with a Forked Tongue

It’s a fel night. I can tell because the light has not quite let go of the clouds. It lingers…all the attention. The attention of humans. It haunts the sky into differing colors, bleeding together like a terribly beautiful painting. Fel night. A night for conquerors. A boy is receiving his first kiss in the park to my right. If he’s lucky, he’ll fall in love. If he’s lucky, the night won’t haunt him. If he’s lucky, a serial killer won’t be lurking around those lifeless bushes, trimmed by the gardener: the decider of plant etiquette.

It’s a fel night…too bright and shameless. Raw light filtration…an atmospheric migration. Let me conquer every droplet of water by the still lake. Let me taste their essence, their pollution, their unique encompassment of the creatures that swam within them. Quiet ducks, hoping not to attract a lick of attention. Silence. Silence is the night, though fel and bright, as if an unquenchable presence were spreading its arms across the globe. An embrace. A vampiric embrace. The ravenous silhouette of the black sun feasts on its own.

A spectral ship is on its course towards the harbor, though it is not carried by the northern winds. It’s a ship without a crew, at least not in the traditional sense. Trapped liars of an ageless time pull on the oars. If you’d ask them how old they were or what century they would call home, you would certainly not receive the truth. They lied their way through life, just as they lied their way towards the afterlife. Thus, they were banished beneath the veil of Death; that useless layer without any true definition or purpose, aimlessly wandering the seas.

Shh! Shh! Can you hear that? That howl sounded raw, as if it came straight from the soul…now departing. I guess I was wrong. The poor boy did expire beneath the blood-stained hands of a serial killer. A man who’d just turned forty-two. He’d killed a few cats around the neighborhood, stalking the night like a bad odor caught on a current of wind. The cats knew. They’d always known what his true intentions were beneath that fleshy mask of a friendly face. This was his first human sacrifice to the demons within. Death always came with a smile on his handsome face. Damn. The boy was only fourteen.

A homeless man is shooting up in the park a few streets down. He’d heard the howl, which was somewhere between a young man and a boy’s voice. It matters not to him. Nothing matters anymore as his eyes roll back into his head. Little does he know that he’s also being watched by a man named Frederick. A pitiful man, a true hermit. He’s been living through the guidance of a peculiar skull he had found in a river. It is a human skull with a thick jawbone. It reminds him of the missing father in his life. His father had been killed in a freak factory accident involving a hydraulic press. He’d been cleaning the machine when it had magically decided to turn on, crushing his head as if it were made of soft clay.

This skull, spewing out dark whispers in the night, had to be his lost father’s shattered mind…personified. Fate must have given their relationship a second chance. The skull had told him at precisely 3:04 AM that it needed souls in order to become more materialized in his world. And there, Frederick was, stalking an easy target. A homeless man who had just tranquilized himself through heroin. The needle wasn’t clean. It hadn’t been the last four uses either. Frederick approaches him with a dry mouth. His jaw hangs open wide. He’d never dreamt of this, nor had he imagined that his life would take him down this twisted path.

Frederick pulls the knife out of his pocket, unsure of how to use it. He realizes very quickly that he doesn’t need to. The homeless man is snoring with white, bloodshot eyes. Frederick grabs the homeless man’s hand, stained with years of filth and neglect. He pulls him off the wooden park bench and watches as his head thuds and bounces off the cement like a hollow basketball. Frederick pauses, checking to make sure that the man is still alive. He still snores calmly, inhaling the cold, fel night’s air.

Frederick strains as he pulls him by the arm, hoping that no one is watching him. He manages to pull the man all the way back to his first floor apartment without any resistance or trouble. He groans as he closes the door behind him and falls to the floor, panting. Frederick pulls himself up to his feet and walks over to the living room to console the peculiar skull. It looks eerie, staring at him through hollow eyes…grinning at him through crooked, shattered teeth. “Here, father. I have brought you your first soul,” says Frederick with a grin and a bow. He then stands up, shocked…almost offended. “What do you mean it’s not good enough! It’s a man, isn’t it? Sure, he may be lost and stained, but he’s still a man with a soul!”

The inanimate skull continues to talk to Frederick through the voices in the schizophrenic’s head. This, of course, would have been his family’s explanation for their son’s peculiar behavior, if his family had still been in touch with him. “Fine, fine! Let’s just call this a practice run, okay? The next one will be better. The next one will be a man of status. An evil man…a rich man who deserves it. But in the meantime, please father, eat!” Frederick drags the homeless man into the living room. The poor man with unkempt hair and a long beard, petrified with filth and crawling things, is still snoring. Frederick doesn’t like the fact that the homeless man is smiling, locked away inside a heroin induced chemical coma. It doesn’t feel right taking a life from someone who is smiling. He needs to know what is happening. He needs to be aware of his impending doom. “Wake up!” Frederick hisses into the man’s ear. He can hear the skull cackling at his failure, pouring fuel onto the fire of insanity brewing deep within his mind. “I said, wake up!” yells Frederick, this time punching the homeless man square in the jaw. Nothing changes, except for the pitch of the homeless man’s snore. It has grown deeper and more guttural. Frederick looks back at the skull with bared teeth. Spit drips down his chin in long strings. “Stop laughing at me!” Frederick yells, grabbing the lamp and throwing it as hard as he can at the skull. He changes the angle of his throw at the last second, knowing full well that he does not actually want to harm the skull…his father.

There is a loud, impatient knock on the door. Frederick gasps and all goes silent and dark as he holds his breath. The light from the broken lamp fades away to nothing. The only audible sound is the steady snoring of the homeless man, keeping a calm rhythm to the increasing tension of the moment.

“I can hear you in there. I can hear your heartbeat. Please, help me. I have done something horrible. I know you’ll understand,” says a man’s voice, quavering with fear.

Frederick’s dark brown eyes fixate on the front door. He can hear his heart pounding in his ears. Even louder than that, he can hear the skull cackling at this sudden turn of events. Had he been discovered? Was it a trap? Technically, he hadn’t done anything yet. All he’d done was rescue a poor homeless man in need of help off the streets, giving him a place to sleep for the night. “Who are you? What do you want?” says Frederick, realizing that he has nothing to hide.

“Please, open the door. I don’t know where else to go. No one else will understand me,” says the stranger. He’s crying through a wail soaked in regret.

Frederick walks over to the door and looks out the peephole. The man outside looks like he’s in his forties or fifties. He has grey eyes that have a psychopath’s stare. “Look, I’m very busy at the moment. Go home!” Frederick frowns and turns around to find an alternate source of light.

Let him in. He’s the one whom you must sacrifice. He’s the one who truly deserves it. He will try to kill you. Don’t let him.

Frederick looks up at the skull. The words that slipped off its forked tongue are grounded in truth. There is no joke or laughter coming from his father’s skull anymore. Without hesitation, Frederick grabs a flashlight from the bookshelf in the small living room. He doesn’t turn it on. He then swings open the front door and takes a few steps back. “Come in,” he says to the grey-eyed and grey-haired man, still sobbing outside. Frederick raises an eyebrow in the dark when he realizes that the stranger’s hands are covered in fresh blood.

“Oh God…thank you! Thank you for letting me inside! I-I’ve done something terrible. I’ve made a mistake. I thought that I wanted this. I truly believed that I was ready to become a murderer. I mean, what else could I become in this world? They’ve always rejected me…the normal folk.” The man enters and closes the door behind him. It’s pitch black. “Hello? Are you still there?”

Frederick turns on the flashlight, blinding the man with one hand. With the other, he jabs him in the side of the throat with the trusty taser which he’d bought for his mother before she’d been sent away to the nursing home. She passed away in there. Alone. Abandoned. Worthless and abused behind closed doors. She couldn’t even recall who she was anymore towards the end.

The man who had just murdered the boy who was enjoying his first make-out session, falls to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Frederick looks at the two unconscious men and realizes something very important. That skull is not his father. That sort of cruelty comes only through lies and deceit. Surely his father would never lie to him like this, putting his own son on a soul-staining path with purgatory as its final destination.

You’re doubting me…us, whispers the skull in a deep and stern voice. You’re losing your focus. How long do you think that this killer will remain unconscious on the floor from that taser? Tie him up, now!

Frederick turns around with his flashlight, ready to smash the skull to pieces, when he feels a sharp, cold sensation in his lower back.

“I’m sorry,” says the murderer, popping his human cherry a second time in the same night. His hand rests on the dirk that has just slipped into Frederick’s right kidney. Frederick produces no sound. The feeling is that of ringing pain, numbing into relief. Part of him wanted the option of death to be out of his control.

“Don’t apologize. Make sure…that you…destroy…the skull. Can you…promise me…that?” says Frederick with a final groan before collapsing to the ground. The murderer helps him descend, making sure that Frederick doesn’t hit his head; a courtesy that Frederick had not shown the murderer. “Will you…promise?”

“Shh. Yes. I will shatter it to bits. You sleep now. It will all be over soon, my brother.” The murderer feels Frederick’s chest and finds the exact spot between his ribs where his heart is beating. He seamlessly slips the dirk in between his ribs. Frederick’s eyes grow large for a moment before collapsing into two black holes of forgotten memories and mental sickness. The virus that was his brain had finally left the world for all eternity.

There is no blood, not until the murderer pulls the dirk out of his heart. He can’t believe his eyes. The murderer is crying! He can finally feel something. He cannot recall the last time he had truly felt something wholesome or been brought to tears by the loss of someone or something. He immediately snaps out of it. Tears mean DNA. He cannot leave a trail if he is to follow his plan.

The murderer, inexperienced with adrenaline coursing through his veins, forgets about the skull and the promise he’d just made to destroy it. The police now have it. A skull, polished and inanimate. They run DNA tests on it to try to understand whose skull this was. The homeless man on the floor had not been useful. The police could have arrested him for the amount of drugs and the overused needle tucked away in his pocket, but they decided not to.

The skull sits there in evidence now, covered in plastic. No one has seen its forked tongue, locked behind teeth that only open for faithful ears. Ms. Nancy Adams, one of the technicians working late at the police station, makes her way into the evidence room to take inventory. She hears strange voices and steady breathing coming from inside the dark and spacious room.

“Hello?” she calls with a whisper extinguished of hope. There is no response. Only what sounds like a quiet heartbeat, beating steadily in the darkness. A chill crawls up her spine, making the hairs stand up on the back of her fair neck.

Come closer, whispers a voice from the back of her mind. Nancy gasps and decides to leave the room. The decision is made, though her legs are unable to carry out the action. Her feet feel as if they’d sunk through eight feet of cement. She screams into her own throat. The sound does not leave her mouth. The room goes dark, but not as it pertains to the spectrum of colors. It’s closer to black invisibility.

Nancy sees a small girl with light brown hair running through a grassy field. She’s swept up by a tall, slightly balding, slender man. It’s her father, the way she remembers him when he was a young man, before cancer had eaten away his pancreas. The little girl is an eight-year-old version of herself; clueless to the pain that the loss of her father would bring.

Closer! demands the phantom voice.

“No!” screams the voice of a little girl. Nancy realizes that it’s her own voice. Those who could have seen Nancy in her current state, would have believed that she was having a stroke or a seizure. Her muscles are tense and she’s drooling all over the floor in long, dry strings of saliva.

Yes. Give me everything. The longer you resist, the more painful this will be. I have all the time in the world. You do not. Accept me…let me stain your soul with my essence. Take me home with you. Place me on the mantelpiece and I will give you knowledge beyond this world. Knowledge you didn’t even know existed. The voice is soothing yet terrifying. Nancy can sense an ancient presence within its tone…something that has seen too many ages.

“You…you are…” drawls Nancy.

Yes, I am. Say it. Feel it flow through your veins.

Nancy’s lips are allowed a sliver of control. She opens her mouth and utters the letters that turn into words that carry different meaning than any other words she has ever uttered in her entire life. “Angel…of…wrath. Hemah.”

Yes. And?

“Angel of anger…Af,” whispers Nancy. She uses the withering control over her lips to produce a thin smile. She feels a certain comfort knowing that these are angels speaking to her. Her comfort takes a tumble when she is forced to walk over to the evidence box containing the skull.

She grabs it and unwraps the plastic covering its ossified dome. She feels something wrapping around her left wrist. It feels like a leathery rope. Nancy gasps when she realizes that it’s a forked tongue, peeking out from between the two front teeth of the inanimate skull. It gives off a burning sensation, like being stung by a jellyfish or placing your arm over a fire for too long. The channels of the forked tongue shine black and red down the middle.

Anger makes us blind, says one of the voices. Forcing us to see black.

Wrath destroys us, forcing us to see red, says the other.

“What now?” says Nancy, not wanting to know the answer. These weren’t the angels that she’d heard stories about growing up as a child.

Now, we go home, together.

Nancy embarks on her journey back home without any say in the matter. They know exactly where she lives and what her favorite route is to walk home, especially at night. Hemah and Af are part of her now. Such a sweet, innocent young lady to be corrupted by an unquenchable thirst of anger and wrath toward those who deserve it. A new serial killer would be born that night, with skills and techniques perfected throughout the ages. The ancient arts of angels, black and red.