The Darker Realms

Sigil Magic

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Helen

Lucy was strange little girl, everyone said. Always with her head in a book. The ‘Library Nerd’ one crueller playmate called her. But that was right before the playmate disappeared in the nearby woods and she hadn’t been seen for weeks, so no-one remembers the cruel name for Lucy. Except for me, but I’d never use it. I like Lucy.

Our teacher Marion didn’t really appreciate her literary aims either. She had a set curriculum to take all us children through and when Lucy wouldn’t stop reading her damn book while the maths lesson was on she made her stand up and turn her back to the class in the corner and she took Lucy’s book – strange and heavy and old as it was. and locked it in her desk drawer at the front of the class.

I heard Lucy crying, and some of the other children laughed at the sound. But that was a few days ago and the teacher is nowhere to be found either, and the children who laughed have all come down with whooping cough and the doctors in town are frantic, unable to help. So no-one’s laughing about Lucy being in the corner now.

Lucy got her book back too. I saw the teacher lock it away but now I see her with it in the library. I don’t think it belongs here, anymore than Lucy really does, but I’ve always been curious and I don’t judge. My ma always said there’s room enough for all the strange ones in this strange world.

So I go up to her and ask her what she’s reading. She looks at me with wide, saucer eyes, and it occurs to me that no-one had ever asked before. She shyly turns the book towards me and I can’t make head nor tail of what I see on the pages. Not words, just squiggles and images I can’t understand.

‘It’s sigil magic,” she says, as though that explained everything.

I liked the sound of that though. All kids like magic don’t they?

“Cool” I say.

Lucy smiles so big a smile I thought her face would crack. I haven’t seen her smile before, and something tells me that there’s more to this than a smile, and maybe, just maybe, she’ll let me in on the secret. And I’ve always been curious, as I said.

“Cool,” I say again. “Show me how it works.”

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged dark, death, Horror, Magick, Sigil, sigil magick, sorcery, spells | 7 Comments

Retribution

Posted on April 3, 2020 by Helen

Image Credit: keep light/Shutterstock.com

A simple price to pay for efficient work is always welcome. I have no tolerance for fiddle-faddling about. The law is far too slow for sweet revenge and far too blind. You cannot count on that. No, it seems to me that a bargain is always best. You get what you pay for, after all.

I’d heard good reports on her work in the shadowy parts of town where all the truths lie hidden. They say she made her own bargain many years before, to some voodoo king or other. I’m not that interested in her history, only her efficacy. And they said she was the best.

The only problem is that her work is rather singular and very much final. There are no subtleties here. She does not have a range of pain and humiliation up her sleeve, or the slow deterioration of your victim’s life. No, her work is swift and fatal and that’s it.

I might quibble that this lacks some artistry, but there is no doubting the efficiency of her Art. She’s not one to argue or barter with either. Her terms are her terms and the only terms. Still, why would I push the point? She could just as easily turn her doll and pin in my direction after all. No, it’s better by far to be a focussed customer, and thereafter a satisfied one.

And I’ve been both. Just yesterday I stood with the other hypocrites mourning the passing of my target, the rain falling on our shrouded heads like the gods trying to wash away the truth. I had to hide my satisfied smile as they lowered the coffin into the moist, pitiless earth.

It’s all hidden now, just like the body of the one I hated. Food for worms. All that’s left is an electronic transfer of funds from one bank account to another. A normal, unremarkable thing in this normal, unremarkable world. But under that, something far more remarkable.

And me, a very satisfied customer indeed.

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged curse, death, Horror, horror flash fiction, killer, transaction, voodoo | 2 Comments

All These Mine

Posted on March 20, 2020 by Helen

Image Credit: Motortion Films/Shutterstock.com

All these mine
And more in time
The poet never knows the rhyme
The killer never knows the kiss
Such sweetness he will always miss
And yet in time
All these are mine
Just mine

All these mine
They’ll never find
The tape will play and still rewind
The words I spoke still float downstream
Melody lost within a scream
And yet in time
All these are mine
Just mine

All these mine
And never kind
I leave their history far behind
As judge and jury execute
My rulings far beyond dispute
And so in time
All these are mine
Just mine

Posted in Poetry | Tagged darkness, death, execution, horror poetry, killer, serial killer | 3 Comments

Programming

Posted on March 6, 2020 by Helen

They show me these awful images, on repeat. They call it conditioning – a necessary step to the evolution of my mind beyond the lesser experience of empathy.

The heart, they say, is but a muscle, and we must strengthen it and take away its sentimentality, its compassion – all the weaknesses that leech away our strength. We must be wiped of all fellow feeling to truly feel our own essential freedom.

All this they say. But all I want to do is run, to scream, to throw up as each image scars my brain. There is something deeply wrong here. There must be. For the images are real, not make up, not special effects. Such suffering they show or promise. And for this, there must be victims, and I am to forget that? For freedom?

But what did my friend Laurence say? That those that do not manage the programming become the victims. The ultimate test of Darwin’s law – the survival of the fittest. To resist is to become one with the pictures in a far worse way. It is to become their subject rather than their audience.

He knew, he saw it all. He was always the clear one of our gang. But I haven’t heard from him in days, and something in me fears that he failed the test, as I may yet do if I cannot hold down the bile threatening to rise up my throat even now.

And oh my god, this picture now, this torso, torn and tortured – looks too familiar. Looks just like Laurence, but the face is mangled beyond recognition. Still I see the tattoo on the wrist, the single, flying dove, and I know. I know it’s him.

And that they’ve shown me this for a reason – they already suspect I may not pass the test. Who knows, maybe in those final moments evenLaurence gave me up and told them of my doubts. I’ll never know, and his death now is like the bell, tolling for me.

For if he failed, then surely so will I. So will I.

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged death, Horror, MK Ultra, programming, tests, torture, trauma, trauma based mind control | 3 Comments

The Monks

Posted on February 21, 2020 by Helen

We’re not sure when the monks turned, or why. Rumors had swirled thought the Vatican for years. People pointed to the snake like architecture of papal lodgings and meeting rooms. They whispered about secret meetings in the bowels of the buildings, and just when the religion turned from faith to denial.

Rumors are hyperbolic of course. It is their nature. I cannot say if the Church itself turned, only the monks in this one chapter I reviewed. Feeling like a Witchfinder General from the days of the inquisition or something, I studied them from within. I joined their ranks and I watched their ways and as the hints were dropped I took the bait.

They let me into their secrets, their rituals, and the god they now worshiped. The fallen one, the star of the morning, the Venusian luciferian one. And I could have almost believed them, their gnostic views, their arguments on theology and philosophy and history. They were clever and eloquent and they’d clearly convinced themselves at least. And they might have convinced me..except..except for the children.

It was the children. the death of the children. The sacrifice of their light. That’s what spurred me to reveal them and bring the down. That’s what made me turn against all their sweet words. In truth I’d entered the investigation in two minds – constrained by and doubting in my faith. But there’s nothing like seeing the real dark to remind you why you yearn for the light.

The real light, not the false flame of the falling star of the morning. And the real faith, not that of the fallen monks with more blood on their hands than in their broken, charcoal hearts.

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged church, death, Horror, horror flash fiction, luciferianism, monks, rituals, sacrifice, satanism | 3 Comments

All In A Day’s Work

Posted on February 7, 2020 by Helen

When they called it the Purge I thought, hey yeah, that sounds cool. I mean, it does, doesn’t it? I wasn’t thinking about that horror movie franchise of the time and all the political garbage that showed. No, I was thinking when you purge something you get rid of something bad and you feel better, right? So I signed up.

After all, jobs were hard to come by back then and nowadays it’s even worse. You’d think with all the culling of the herd it’d get better, but no such luck. Automation, they said. AI, they said. Make your life easier they said. Well, never listen to what they say.

Just doing my bit, I told my ma. She wasn’t that impressed. Thought she’d wasted all that money on my education, but education these days doesn’t equip you for anything but debt. And I had debts to pay off, and besides, I cottoned on real quick. Get with the program, help with the purge or be purged, right?

Free stuff they said. Universal health care they said. Don’t worry about the cost. First we’ll have the Purge and get rid of anyone who can’t pull their weight. Pro-active death panels. Made sense, and I was fit and ready to jump right in. I’ve always been ahead of the curve.

Now the only curve I’m ahead of is the one in this blasted road. And my job is weighing me down, in more ways than one. Another death, another statistic for the record books, just all in a day’s work.

There’s no end to it, and bit by bit you lose it all – all your friends, your family. They took my ma and purged her a few weeks back and by then I didn’t feel a thing. I haven’t felt a thing for ages really except the aching of my back, the tiredness of my legs, my shoulder whinging all the time from the load I carry.

Still, I purge. It’s that or be purged. While the so-called saviours of our world with all their free stuff live high on the hog, grabbing all the world in their greedy hands as they thin out our herd.

I can’t complain though. I’ve got a job. These days it means something. And if that something is lugging dead bodies to exhumation plants, at least it’s an honest day’s work.

Right?

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction | Tagged death, death panels, Horror, horror flash fiction, killer, politics, Purge, socialism | 2 Comments

The Old School-House

Posted on January 24, 2020 by Helen

Image Credit: Special View/Shutterstock.com

The old school house
They closed it down
When children went missing
All over town
When people gossiped
Said in its walls
The monsters crept
We heard their calls
Hysteria rising
Each passing day
The old school principal
Passed away
And stories of rituals
Did the rounds
The old school house
They closed it down

The old school house
Still stands today
Its gardens broken
It’s in decay
The children whisper
To never go
Within its doors
It scares them so
A haunted house
Would never be
As fearful a place
To you or me
And if it’s true
I dare not say
As the old school house
Still stands today

Helen M Valentina (c ) 2020

Posted in Poetry, Uncategorized | Tagged evil, ghosts, gossip, horror poetry, missing children, rumours, school house | 2 Comments

Truly Gothic Literature

Posted on January 10, 2020 by Helen

Image credit: Triff/Shutterstock.com

Daniel Keats was a little known writer when he was alive. Like many aspiring authors he banged away endlessly at his keyboard each day, hoping to write that one novel that would make him famous. But as the rejection slips piled up even higher than the volume of books he wrote, he fell to a despair.

With his last dwindling funds he self published one book – one special book. He called it his gothic masterpiece, a rambling self indulgent manifesto about the power of creativity and the vacuity of the modern world. Every last drop of his disappointed soul bled into the pages. Once published by a local vanity press, he cajoled a friendly librarian to place a copy on their shelves, and there it would no doubt gather dust from a lack of readership.

He visited for a few weeks, hoping to see it taken out, borrowed by someone, but the book remained unopened. And with that his last hopes died, and he followed soon thereafter, at his own hand.

But much of Daniel had more than figuratively bled into those pages. A year to the day from his death someone did take the book out. The title of the book “Gothic Yearnings’ fit the broad requirements of an academic research piece into gothic literature, and the researcher who took out the work was hardly discerning or well-informed on who was established as a Gothic author, as opposed to anyone who might just have written something with the word ‘gothic’ in the title.

This was all it took, however, for Daniel’s ghost to escape. The first time the book opened the researcher saw something like smoke rising from its pages and decided he was overwrought and over-tired and put it down to his imagination. But those smoky needs surrounded him and he found he couldn’t stop reading the book. Once finished he couldn’t stop extolling its virtues. And then, each time someone read the book at his, or another’s instance, the same spectre rose and captured another soul, entrancing them.

That’s how Daniel Keats’ ‘Gothic Yearnings’ became a bestseller posthumously. It’s how it transfigured the whole genre of gothic literature, and not, I can tell you, for the better. But it is what it is, and gothic sensibilities are now indistinguishable from Daniels’ and all it really shows is the power of the written word.

Or the power of ghosts, depending on how you look at it. I’ll leave the final analysis to you.

Helen M Valentina (c ) 2020

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction, Uncategorized | Tagged bestsellers, ghosts, gothic, horror flash fiction, influence, writing | 2 Comments

Trafficked

Posted on December 26, 2019 by Helen

Image Credit: SAHACHATZ/Shutterstock.com

This time they chose the wrong one to traffic.

It’s funny how sometimes it’s the most usual of things that bring an operation undone, and this certainly was instant karma, rough justice really. They’d done their usual sweep of the city in its darkest shadowy corners, finding its most broken and lost and abandoned women and children. Sometimes even flagrantly grabbing less unfortunate off the streets when they looked well suited to a particularly wealthy client’s taste.

Just another run in a grand international operation, as organised and bureaucratised as a government department, and no doubt secretly sponsored by some behind the scenes.

But then, they grabbed her. A young girl, barely out of her teens, wandering the less darkened streets on the way home from school. She cried and screamed prettily, as they’d expect, and one or two of them took the opportunity to grope the merchandise as they drugged her and put her in her cage, her box, her transportation device.

But what they didn’t know was that she was just playing possum. She could have escaped and killed them right from the outset. She was impervious to their drugs too. But she wanted to get them all together and do it right because she understood what her capture meant.

And frankly she’d had enough of the darkness. Other darknesses had trained her, made her what she was. Now it was time to pay it all back. Or pay it forward, depending on your view of things.

They didn’t think much when they saw her hand grasping out of the cage. They just figured she’d woken from the drugs a bit more quickly. They dragged the cage out to the centre of the human marketplace precisely for that reason, because she could come out and show herself to the high rollers encircling them now.

And she came out alright, a fire in her eyes blazing and the power of her will shimmering and striking with the intensity and precision of a nuclear strike. Within seconds every foul creature in the room was dead and her only regret was that they didn’t last long enough to really see it coming, or to suffer.

Never mind. She knew about hell too. She’d been there and back, literally, in her training. Once she’d freed the other victims she’d take a trip down there, to the icy inner circle where she knew they’d be found.

Vengeance is a dish best served cold, after all.

Helen M Valentina (c ) 2019

Posted in Horror Flash Fiction, Uncategorized | Tagged hell, Horror, horror flash fiction, human trafficking, power, revenge, training | Leave a comment

Art Show

Posted on December 12, 2019 by Helen

Image credit: Oleh Voinilovych/Shutterstock.com

Davis: I swear to god I warned them. Priest’s art shows were always bizarre and frankly in poor taste if you ask me, but my bosses didn’t care. As long as it sold, and controversy sells, that’s what they say.

Detective Webb: Well, they got controversy this time, that’s for sure. But how did they pull it off, that’s the material question.

Davis: I have no idea! You’re asking the wrong person. I just put the exhibits up and do the promo materials. This time it gave me nightmares even before all…that.. happened. All those skulls screeching out of the plastic base canvas. And those things with broken dolls. I mean. Ugh. He was demented.

Detective Webb: That’s one way of putting it. But how did he and half his patrons on opening night end up in the exhibits, that’s what we need to understand. How did he end up spreadeagled and impaled on the ‘kitchen sword’ display, for instance? Or the entire assembly from the East Side Art Appreciation club end up mauled in the mouths of those skulls? I mean, there’s art appreciation – even audience participation – and then there’s just..I don’t even know what that was.

Davis: And how would I know? I was on the reception counter the whole time! I didn’t see anything. mean, I heard stuff, but that frightened me so much I didn’t go looking. I’m not like those idiots in horror movies…

Detective Webb: But you said yourself, you warned the gallery owners. So what did you think you were warning them about?

Davis: Just him, just what they say about him. that he’s not just an artistic, that he’s..sorry he was.. a magus and that all his works were elaborate rituals. You hear stories, in the industry, of other galleries being under some kind of curse after showing him..though nothing like that..nothing like the art actually killing the artist and his patrons.that’s a whole other level of horrorshow..that is..So I said don’t show him, it isn’t worth it, but they never listen.

Detective Webb: And you didn’t see anything, nothing at all?

Davis: Only other patrons running screaming out of the exhibition area. I wasn’t going looking then, as I said. I’m not a fool. Why bother me? Why not watch the security camera footage if you want details?

Detective Webb: It went on the blink. Convenient, wouldn’t you say?

Davis: I guess.

Detective Webb: But maybe not for you, given part of your job description is also..let me just check, oh yes..gallery security? So why wouldn’t we think you had more than a general idea of what was going to happen?

Davis: What are you saying? I had nothing to do wth this! I tried to stop it!

Detective Webb: Then why did we find this?

(Detective holds up a photo of the scene to the camera. In blood, next to the cannibal skulls, is a short sentence written in blood “It’s all for you Davis, all for you”)

Davis: Shit.

Detective Webb: Yes, that’s about the size of it champ. So why don’t we start again? What happened?