The Great Game

If you’re new to the Great Game, please have a quick look at the blurb to your left, where you’ll find a short catch-up introduction!

There are worlds of anguish in Massinisa’s eyes as he collapses, a broken, greying marionette. Wildly, I hope his soul somehow escaped. Alice screams again, a horrible sound blending terror, loss and flowering madness.

The tendril retracts.

The door to the room slams open, and several people are suddenly scrabbling to keep back. I hear one of them swear.

Maybe the morosos is distracted… I stagger to my feet and quickly press on with my banishing. “Kharos, I command you to be gone from this place and return from whence you came.”

Outside the door, I can hear the new arrivals start up some sort of chant as I’m speaking. They’re arranged in a rough semicircle, and they look grim. The morosos rolls over one of them, and his clothes and skin slough straight off, forming a dark mist around his wet, pulsing body. He opens his mouth to scream, and his entire body rips open down the centre, from the bridge of his nose down to his groin. The Morosos slides inside. The chant falters, but the macandal guys are made of strong stuff, and they continue.

So do I. “Kharos, I command you again to be gone from this place and return from whence you came.” A horrible stench hits me like a hammer, blood and shit and offal and foulness. I’ve never smelled anything like it. It would make my eyes water, if they weren’t so damn hot.

Blood and bile oozing out of the horrible central crack, the skinned corpse turns to the man next to it. It reaches up, and tears his head straight off his neck as easily as if it was picking a wild flower. Whilst the headless torso is still falling, the skinned corpse adjusts its grip on the head it just plucked, and mashes it down onto the skull of the man next to it. His cranium vanishes in a cloud of blood, bone shards and tissue. Then the morosos billows back out of the corpse and surrounds the last man. He immediately starts frothing and melting, the gore evaporating into the morosos like an ice-cube under a blow torch.

“Kharos, I command you for the third time to be gone from this place and return from whence you came. Begone!”

Slumped on the floor, Alice is laughing, a high, horrible sound, and as the last of the macandal guys vanishes, she starts clapping.

It starts flowing towards us, darker now, the shape always churning and shifting, and my voice dies away. Damned Hollywood. Can’t trust them to get anything right.

From somewhere outside, a strong, hard voice starts shouting in a language I don’t know. The bokor. It sounds a bit like French that he’s speaking, but it isn’t. The morosos stops approaching, wavers, and then heads back towards the doors.

Then I realise he’s started yelling at me. “The girl’s blood, seer. Kill her. Now.”

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Today’s photo is Skin Man by Paul Stephenson.