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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Walpurgisnacht
A "Vorare" Story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

The light of the stars was mirrored by a dozen bonfires lit upon the Farm's grounds. Their flames reached up into the black night sky as the starlight shone down, casting an autumnal glow over the new grass around the Farmhouse, over the new coats of paint that decorated the outbuildings. Whatever George had done with his newfound strength in their escape, he had failed to pull the place up by its roots and salt its grounds as he had intended.

Throughout the bonfires figures moved like old ghosts and memories, flitting from one to the next, meeting and merging for a single breath before separating to stand a while at one another's side. They spoke, he was sure of it - but from his vantage point in a tree, Gordon could not hear them.

Neither did he truly see them - he saw their inner fires, the souls and hunger which his Ally had revealed to him in his first days of experimentation. The treeline remained a good distance from the Farm's grounds, and even against the firelight they would have been indistinct had their hunger not shone forth so brightly.

"They can't spot me the same way, can they?"

"No," crooned his Ally, "your hunger is no longer within this world, and it is cloaked from all who might see."

The smell of wood smoke overpowered the other scent - that of roasting flesh and heavy spices. "No matter how much, or what, they devour this night?"

"No. The feeding gives them strength, yes, and stamina, should they be of the proper bloodline; but the sight comes only with your steps beyond the world they know. They will spot you only with the eyes they have been given, hear you only with the ears which they have trained. The beasts are your greatest worry in this regard."

"What beasts?"

"The hounds. You may not see them for their hungers are base, but they are there, roaming the Farm to keep their masters watchful."

"Let's hope the wind stays steady, then. I don't plan to move on them tonight and I'd just as soon they never know I'm here."

"You are far enough from their grounds, I think. Have you seen them to the trees ere now?"

"I've dealt with their hunting parties. I'm pretty sure they're familiar with the woods, but I guess it was near the road that they found me ?"

"They pray at the altars of civilization and domestication." The words were hissed with a certain irony, though his Ally continued. "Theirs is not the realm of the wild wood. They fear it, I think, in their deepest hearts."

"You know more about the Ghouls than I thought," said Gordon, not bothering to disguise the question in his voice.

"All things of this world are young in my sight. Those who seek to influence the worlds beyond soon become known if they have any success, known and marked and eventually chosen by one or another."

"So there are many of you."

There was silence a moment. "Yes, O'child of man, there are. Not so thick as the flies of the field, nor so fruitful as your own dear and desperate kind. But I am not alone in these worlds, and I have marked the Ghouls since the first day they danced around the fires you see before us."

"Marked, but not chosen."

"Mine is for the wild wood, the spaces beyond what has ever been tamed. I care not for their fence-post worshipping, nor the energy they pour into maintaining boundaries and bloodlines. The praise of propinquity ever fails in the end."

"But they have been chosen."

"Oh, yes."

"Tell me how."

The fires in the distance seemed to recede from Gordon's probing questions, the light of moon and stars now casting a pale glow over the thin green leaves of the tree in which he sat. Since the night in the motel - or rather, since the morning after - they had spoken little as they drove, half by hidden memories and half by soul-sight, along the highways of the upper Midwest to search for the Farm. More than once his Ally had corrected a direction, yet Gordon's questions had been short and perfunctory. He had shed his own boundaries in accepting the death of the truck driver, and in doing so, he truly felt he had turned the Wound into the Ally. When it spoke, it spoke respectfully, and without the sweet lisping seductions which had marked what he now thought of as his apprenticeship.

"There is an opening," said his Ally. "Through both the preparation of the flesh and the strength of the sacrificial bloodline. When they devour the ritual flesh, whether they are aware or not - as you well know - the world is opened and the body is entered."

"Possession?"

"No. Were you compelled to any task, bidden to any thought, after you ate of the flesh? You were not possessed, nor spoken to. Many of the Ghouls fall into the same category, especially young Ghouls who seek no further. It takes time, and effort, and great preparation to divine those who will be spoken to."

"Those of the proper bloodline."

"Correct. Those like you."

"And allies like you will then speak to or through those chosen ones, to what end?"

"The Gentlemen Ghouls want civilization and order in this part of the world. They were present in the jungles of Tlaxcala and in the Roanoke fires, at the outskirts of Hudson's Bay and in the cliffs of the Anasazi."

"Wait. They're based on native traditions?"

"They are based on nothing but the desire for boundaries and terminals. Their concern is not with who draws the borders, only that the lines be drawn. Your race or creed or color means no more to them than the number of legs on an insect means to you, only the foundation of a tradition and the continuation of the bloodline which founded said tradition."

Gordon thought a moment. What, then, was his number of legs to the voice within his wound? The question was almost ridiculous, the answer obvious. It was nothing. What he had thought of as a human concern was much, much more - something he had known in his heart the moment he woke in the woods, bloodied and stumbling at the instruction of the wound in his arm.

He no longer felt that he needed to sidestep or mince words with his Ally. Yet by the same token, if the Ally did not possess him - if it spoke through the wound and not to the mind - then perhaps, he felt, his own thoughts were still closed to it. He could keep his own counsel when it seemed wise, and his thoughts and counsel told him that he remained a tool in this matter, just as those who moved along the bonfires behind their precious fences were tools to something beyond themselves.

"Your world lies under this one, like a vein beneath flesh. That's right, isn't it?"

"It is a thought as good as any other."

"So it's almost the pulse of a given ritual that draws your attention and allows you - well, encourages you to mark and choose the humans who carry it out. When I opened the wound in my arm, when I cut myself with every intention of dying, you came through in that moment of madness and ritual."

"Yes." The answer was surprisingly simple.

"Then what marked me?"

"You suffered. You suffered starvation and madness, betrayal and indignity, flight and fire and the separation from the world. You moved through a world that few alive could begin to understand, and yet you remained yourself, even in your madness, even in your search after death. Your strength is remarkable, and while bloodlines hold little interest to me I see all you might have wrought had you remained upon this Farm, had you remained with these Ghouls."

"You were called by my suffering."

"It is as good an answer as I can give."

"Don't play with me right now."

"I do not play. It is truly as good an answer as I can offer you. I was called and I watched you as you ran through the woods. I was called again to the prison cell where you were kept and again as you scaled the fences to escape, broken and bleeding. I marked you in the trees and outside the farmhouse where you threatened to take a life, and I chose you as you entered the wood with a bright knife and a clear mind.

"Yet if it is your suffering that I hunger for then I have a strange manner of showing it. I brought you to your desire for warmth and civilization. I repressed your hungers and strengthened your body. I protected you from pain and I brought you here as you desired. All I have done has been at your prayer, your request or your command. Is that the act of one which feeds on your suffering?"

"No." Gordon stayed silent a moment. He still felt that there was more to uncover, but the fires in the field were burning more brightly now, fuelled by the shadows that moved among them. He had come to observe and yet had seen little of what was happening, though he had learned much of what lay beneath their rituals.

"If their rituals are interrupted, then the others don't come through, right?"

"It depends upon the strength of their bond. Look to the Farmhouse and see the strength of the lights within. The brighter the hunger, the greater their desire, the stronger their bond is likely to be."

Gordon closed his eyes and slipped once more into the space he had occupied the first day he saw the light of souls - that space above and beyond the world, all darkness in the sky, lit only by the hunger which stretched beneath him. With some effort he drew himself down, brought his focus to bear upon the miles near his physical form, and saw the bright sharp blazes which lay before him, connected by brittle blue-white lines to those which moved outside the Farmhouse. All else was dark in the woods and wild beyond their small boundaries.

"They're strong," said Gordon, "and there's more than one of them."

"Then watch and wait, O'blood of man. Watch and wait."

Story and image by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2007